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shall have rain in an hour"-clouds thickening, wind machine should not be overlooked. We have known the south, &c. But the barometer stood immovable; and no time when at least one active domestic was required to perrain came, till some hours after it began slowly to sink. form the extra labor of the various operations of building We think every large farmer should have a barometer-it fires of wet wood, working an awkward churn, washing will probably pay for itself during each season of hay-cut-on a rickety washboard, scrubbing the floor with a wornting and harvesting-in some localities it may not. The out broom, tying the clothes line to a peach tree, horsebest way to understand its movements, is to watch it for one season. We prefer the single column of mercury, without the circular dial plate and index, the latter being less accurate, and not nearly so satisfactory. The cost is $9 to $12, for such a one as will answer the farmer's purpose.

DOMESTIC TOILS.

Kitchen toils and domestic cares are extremely oppressive on many excellent women, especially among farmers' wives, who are frequently worn down and bent under premature old age at middle life. They cannot be free from care and toil, neither is it desirable that they should be; but the excessive weight which some have to bear, calls for more effort towards relief. There are many who are compelled to rise at dawn, and commence a routine, which only closes late in the evening-and even then rest does not come, when the care of young children, and possibly of sick ones, precludes in a great measure the wholesome and refreshing repose of sleep. It requires a stout constitution for a woman to wash, iron, mend, scour, bake, milk, churn, sweep, cook three meals daily, as often wash dishes, and go through other routines for supplying daily food, besides the care of a family of young children, whose endless wants are a continued interruption to all other operations, without soon being broken down by these ceaseless toils.

A very common course is this:-The mother labors incessantly, in order to give her daughters school education, and perhaps to render them "accomplished;" while they are learning, or playing the lady, she is struggling under a mountain of drudging, until she gets them "married off." They in turn, for the first time, are compelled to assume the same course of labor-the change sours and disheartens them, and the bloom and elasticity of youth have all disappeared before the first ten years have gone; while the greatly higher object of living, namely the continued cultivation and improvement of the mind, forever

ceases.

Whatever unfeeling, selfish, and ill-bred men may say, one thing is proved by the history of the human race, and that is, the farther a people advance from the savage or barbarous state, the greater is the improvement in the physical and mental condition of woman. There are no exceptions. All civilized men will therefore seek assiduously for the means that shall relieve the condition of women, and restore them from the state of mere drudges for the benefit of the men, to a condition of high domestic usefulness and mental refinement. What are the means for accomplishing this desirable end-of relieving the housewife from tiresome, weary, ceaseless labor? We mention a few simple, homespun, and practical.

1. Provide domestic conveniences. Let the wood-house be level with and adjoin the kitchen, and be always supplied with good fuel and dry kindling wood; let the well be provided with the best apparatus for drawing water easily-provide ample cisterns, and connect them by means of good pumps with the kitchen-procure the best cookstove, washing machine, easy churr, butter worker, clothes frames, carpet sweeper-and if needed, the family sewing

post, barn corner, and smoke-house, borrowing water at a neighbor's, driving the pigs out of the yard, making sour bread for want of good wood, making rancid butter for want of a good dairy, and deficiencies in smaller domestic appliances.

2. Let the man of the house and such of his assistants as occupy it, provide themselves with slippers, and then, instead of marching with dirty boots directly into the neatly kept rooms, place them in a proper outer closet and assume the slippers-and if the soiled working cont should also give place to a cleaner one, it would appear more like civilization.

3. In order to lessen the heavy work of providing meals extensively for workmen, erect cheap and neat cottages, so that laborers may board themselves, as we have elsewhere recommended.

4. Adopt a simpler fare. We have known men so fond of good eating, as to keep several members of the family occupied from dawn till dark in cooking fine dishes, baking or roasting costly meats, and manufacturing delicate pastry, with all the numerous appurtenances belonging to this system of gormandizing. In one case, the man who ordered these luxuries had to take a blue pill once a fort night to set his machine straight, which was constantly deranged by high living.

5. Bring up girls to labor cheerfully with their own hands-to make themselves generally useful-to regard active employment as infinitely more honorable than to be nothing but simpering, giggling, coquetting rag babies. Then when they are compelled to take hold with both hands, the charge of a family will be natural and comparatively easy; and instead of being soured because they do not find in real life what they had read of in sentimental novels, they will find much happiness in two ways,―one, in overcoming difficulties,-and the other in conferring happiness on those around them in a hundred little ways.

PRUNING ORCHARDS.

about pruning apple and peach trees-the best time of Will you be good enough to give me some information year to prune, and whether to thin out or shorten in-and also the cherry tree? A. B. Wash. Co., Penn.

Very few orchards are properly pruned. If young trees are judiciously thumb-pruned, so as to keep an even and regular head, very little after pruning will ever be necessary. But when young trees have been neglected, the evils of dense tops, crossing and crooked limbs, and a bad shape, must be gradually removed by cutting away a portion each season, for several successive years. Observe carefully before cutting, with a view to make an even symmetrical head, to avoid if possible large wounds, and to let the light in from the outside, and not to trim up beorchards are distorted and ruined. Peach trees must be low or inside, the latter being the common way in which cut in carefully and evenly from the outside, so as to keep a moderately open and handsomely shaped head, of limited dimensions. Unpruned peach trees after a while have long naked branches, and little foliage-by cutting in, the and excellent crops. Summer is a good time for the work. tops remain neat in form, compact in foliage, and bear full The cherry needs but little pruning-only to keep the tree within proper bounds, and of good form.

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Edirorial Notes Abroad.

No. XXXV---An English Dairy Farmer. [We defer until another opportunity the continuation of the subject of Agricultural Education in Ireland" in the midst of which our last "Notes" were broken off-in order to present the following Memoranda of a Visit in August, 1859, at Burley Hall, the residence of Mr THOMAS HORSFALL, near Otley, Yorkshire, whose contributions and experiments upon various ways of cattle feeding, &c., have attracted much attention. It is proper to remark, in order to account for the way into the papers-that these Notes formed a part of Lectures pre. pared by the writer for the New Haven course last year, an abridged report of which has had some circulation among our contemporaries, although never as yet published in the columns of the Co. GENT.--EDS,]

fact that some of the statements made below have already found their

Mr. Horsfall has not so extensive an establishment as I had prepared myself to anticipate, but I regarded the time expended there as employed quite as usefully, as any other equal number of hours during my whole absence. The farm includes not quite sixty acres along the bank of a pretty little stream, either the Wharfe itself, or flowing into it, I am not certain which. Forty-three acres, or fully three-fourths of the whole, are in grass. The stock upon the place, at one time and another during the season, had been as follows: Heifers and bullocks,......... 21 Two tups and 62 ewes..................... 64 20 pa

bargain to draw from the number according to his wants -the whole to be taken before the end of July. What were left on hand at the end of June were at that time weaned. The ewes themselves are fattened, and sold along during August, September, and October,-fetching from $12 to $12.50 per head; so that the sheep account shows, for not quite a year's keeping of each ewe, (1.) a profit of from 75 cents to $1.25 in the difference between the price paid for her and the price received, (2.) the fleece sheared from her in the spring, which is quite an item-and (3.) the lambs which she has produced and reared-a return which it requires no argument and little arithmetic to show must be considerably beyond the labor of caring for her, and the cost of what she has eaten.

Turning now to the cattle, we find that Mr. Horsfall buys the bullocks he fattens in April or May, grazes them through the summer, finishes them up in the stables, and sells in November; milch kine being found to pay better for winter care. It is the custom, Mr. H. remarked, with the London dairymen to buy in fresh cows as fast as others run dry and are sold, or whenever they need to increase the quantity of milk for sale. It is his system, as I remember what he told me, to keep about twenty cows con106 stantly in milk. He generally buys about the time the Making a total of small cattle and large, numbering 218 | first or second calf comes in; but if he finds the right sort head-a tolerably heavy stock for sixty acres to carry. The land not in grass was employed as follows:

Milch cows,...

Likewise four pigs, two horses, and a pony.

Wheat, 24 acres.

Kohl Rabi, one acre.

Beans, three acres one acre of

Oats, 3% acres.

Dads and Swedes, 3 acres.
winter beans, and two of a long

podded garden variety.
The winter beans, sown in October, were then, Aug.
17, just harvested, and had turned out apparently a good
crop. It is one of which Mr. H. is quite fond; it is out
of the way sooner than spring beans, so that the ground
may be more readily prepared for a succeeding crop of
wheat. This is sown without manure, the land being
already so rich that it is difficult to give the straw stiffness
enough to stand up till harvest. On the wheat field of
this year, (2 acres,) 15 cwt. of salt were sown in the
spring upon those parts where the grain was most liable
to lodge; the amount of seed sown upon the whole was
only two and a half bushels, and the yield had been two
hundred stooks of sheaves-then not thrashed, so that I
have no other data for estimating the product obtained.
After the wheat a rape crop for spring feeding would be
likely to follow, and then oats, perhaps followed by wheat
again, and then roots or beans. This would be a rotation
of six or seven years, but it is not adhered to with any
particular care. Wheat which was to be used for seed,
Mr. H. did not house as soon as the rest, in order to allow
it to dry and mature more thoroughly.

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The particular interest of the place centers more in its live stock and grass fields than in its crops, however, and of these we will begin with the sheep, so as to defer the cattle and dairy matters for our conclusion. Mr. H. rally pays in the vicinity of 45s. sterling, say $11.25 per head for ewes in October, to the number of sixty or there abouts. Fifty-nine of the number purchased in the au tumn of 1858, had brought him the 106 lambs he had to dispose of in 1859. They come mostly from the north, and are probably a cross of the Cheviot male upon Leicester ewes. He made a bargain with the butcher for his lambs this year in one lot at 24s. ($6 each) fatted, a few beginning to go off as early as May, when only four to six weeks old, and the purchaser being allowed in the

of animal, say at three, or still more frequently at four years old, he did not seem so particular as to the season of the year in which she came in his way; milking them cow's extraordinarily good milking qualities seem to jusfor two or three years-the latter period only when the tify it. They go dry from two to three months in the year, and by a little skill in selection, they average about twenty quarts per day when fresh. Mr. H. appeared, like some of our best dairy farmers, to prefer a cross-breed to a pure; he said that what he always chose when possible, was a kind of cow half Short-Horn and half Highland Scots, of which sort, in that part of Yorkshire, there are generally some to be found. As an illustration of the value of such cows as he would select in that part of England, I may mention that the week previously he had purchased three head of these Yorkshire Short-Horns, for £45-say $75 a piece.

These milking cows he keeps constantly in good order, and maintains that much of his success in milk-producing has been due to this fact that it must indeed be ranked as one "leading feature of his practice." Accordingly, when the cow runs dry in her sixth year, she has been gradually getting fatter and fatter for some time back, and a month's "finishing" in the stall is all that is necessary to make her the best of beef. He does not breed any to raise himself, but by this method, some farther particulars of which I am about to give, he accomplishes the double object, as one might almost say, of getting both the milkman's and the stall-feeder's profit out of the same animal.

As we go out now to look over the pasture and meadow lands, we shall obtain a little insight into Mr. Horsfall's out-door management, and then an examination of his stables will lead to that part of his in-door operations connected with feeding, while a subsequent glimpse of his dairy will enlighten us as to the final manipulation of what it is the business of the rest of the establishment to produce.

We saw fourteen acres of meadow, then, which carry about twenty cows and twenty-four sheep, from the time the grass is well up until the middle of October, with very little assistance from other sources.

Another lot of twen

or fescues being generally regarded, I think, as peculiarly suitable for low lying grounds. For under grasses, as he calls them, and clovers, he don't care so much. His lands are all drained, the lines of pipe tile running eight yards apart, and from three to four feet deep, the latter depth being found preferable, and having been employed in the drains most recently put down.

Mr. Horsfall's simplest feeding stable was an inexpen

ty acres, every yard and foot of which is such that the cattle are fond of it, has usually supported, Mr. Horsfall told me, a bullock and one and a half head of sheep with their lambs, to each acre. To these pastures the cattle and sheep are generally admitted about May 16th, previous to that time grazing upon the hay or meadow land, and thus allowing the pastures to have a good start,—the best possible security, Mr. H. thinks, against injury by subsequent drouth. The meadow is thus eaten close early in the sea-sive building, of which I had the curiosity to take the exson, but by the end of June will cut two and a half tons of act measurement, as he seemed to like the plan on which hay per acre, and generally yields, also, a second crop and it was put up quite as well as any other, and as its cheapan aftermath. From this twelve acres of meadow I saw ness, moreover, is such as to put it within the means of any a fine stack, and I have not before referred, I think, to American farmer. The inside length was forty-two feet that peculiarity of English farming which every traveler four inches-outside width fourteen feet ten and a half notices at once--the stacking up of the grain and grass, inches. The back wall was of brick, seven feet three inches so that these beautifully constructed and beautifully high, the end walls also of brick with doors. The front thatched evidences of plenty and skill, form a most prom- of the building toward which the roof sloped, was probainent feature about every farmstead-a stack cut this sea-bly about six feet high; it was composed of six pairs of son from the field referred to, measuring thirty-three feet in doors, so that this whole side could be thrown open if nelength, twenty in breadth, and fourteen in height, and sup-cessary. The roof was of slate and thatched underneath, posed to contain at least thirty tons. Mr. H. estimated a very simple and not uncommon English method, worthy the weight of ordinary hay at sixteen stone (14 lbs. each, of adoption here, of maintaining a more even temperaI suppose,) per cubic yard, or 224 lbs. ; but his early cut ture, by keeping out extremes of heat and cold—the spahay he said, was exceedingly compact in the stack, so ces between the roof timbers being filled in with straw, closely packed, indeed, that he had repeatedly found it by held in place by light strips nailed across, or in some othactual trial to weigh 28 stone per cubic yard, or 392 lbs. er similarly cheap and easy way. In speaking of slate This is remarkably heavy. He finds great advantage, he roofs, I think it is Mr. Mechi who recommends whitewashthinks, in early cutting, never letting the grass get into ing them; because, as he states, the rains of summer will full flower. not carry it off, and the sun's heat is then reflected, while the snow and frost of winter will at once remove it, and then what heat the sun gives will be absorbed.

The best pasture is a deep alluvial loam, but the meadow, which is irrigated, is naturally a thin soil and a strong clay. The irrigation comes from a little brook into which the sewage of the village of Burley flows, and is simply performed by being admitted at the highest point, a gextle knoll, whence furrows having a very gradual descent, carry it over the whole, the water when turned on trickling out from these channels through the grass. It is allowed to run through the winter until March, when, as I have already mentioned, the meadow is grazed until May, and then another irrigation ensues to give a start to the hay crop, and after mowing a third flowing takes place.

I stated the number of animals kept per acre on the pastures, with the qualification of “some little assistance from other sources." This assistance only consists I think in a little cooked food for the milch cows, and in the fact that when the pasturage begins to be less hearty, say at just about the time of my visit in the middle of August, they are stabled at night, and receive a little grass in the stall. This grass is often obtained from the same pasture with a scythe, for, at intervals, where the droppings of the animals have laid, the herbage will not have been eaten off, and a man can soon cut enough of the rank growth thus produced to serve for the housed stock, and if not wanted for the cattle, it is cut just the same and given to the horses. In this way not only the whole growth of the field is completely economized, but the grass itself is kept in better growing order, as well as in better appearance. In hot weather Mr. H. is in the habit of stabling his animals in the day and letting them out at night. All the grass land is also subject to farther manurings, of which we shall speak in connection with the stables and their management.

A wing attached to this building contains feed and a well sheltered apartment for roots; while the water from the roof is collected in a tank, from which a tap may be added to carry it by one turn of a spiggot into each stall. I have forgotten whether the last arrangement was already in operation, or whether it was spoken of as an improvement to be made. One improvement was suggested as worthy of attention in erecting such a stable, viz: The provision of slides in the doors for better ventilation, or what was thought perhaps preferable, the hanging of the doors in two parts, so that either top or bottom alono might be opened or shut at pleasure.

Coming now to the interior arrangement, we find that a little greater width would allow an alley way for feedingwhich runs along the back wall, and toward which the heads of the animals stand--a little wider and more “handy”

its width now being only about thirty inches. The building accommodated eleven or twelve stalls their width being three feet six inches, to three feet nine inches. The manger bottom is only two or three inches above the level of the floor. Its inside width at bottom is fourteen inches; the inside board is nine inches wide, sloping outwards, and the back of the manger one foot eleven inches high, also with a slight slope, so that its inside width at top is fifteen and a half inches. In front of the stall a timber runs three feet and eight inches high from the manger bottom-say four feet two inches outside height from the ground. This would leave an aperture of about twenty inches from the back of the manger to this piece of scantling-eight inches of which is filled by a board hung upon hinges to the latter, so that when feed is put in from the alley way it opens Of the grasses Mr. Horsfall likes best the poas and the back for its admission, while the cattle cannot push it outfestucas, the former genus comprising a number of varie-wards so as to put their heads through.

ties, among which what is there called meadow grass (poa pratensis) is perhaps the best known, and the latter class

The stall partitions are about five feet wide from the extreme front; the cattle are fastened by a chain about the

neck, attached to a ring sliding up and down upon a those not benefitted by its application, thus running exactstanchion about a foot back from the manger in the sidely in the teeth of the long continued and successful praeof the stall. The floor of the stall is worthy of particular tice at Burley Hall. Dr. V. also advocates the dilution of description. A piece of cocoa nut matting three feet the liquid, a thing that Mr. Horsfall never does-drawing square occupies the upper end, having straw under it, and his argument too exclusively as the latter thought, from the securely fastened down. Back of this there are grates Flemish farmers on the sandy soils of Belgium. It is unopening into a tank beneath, not quite three feet deep, doubtedly true that to use liquid manure to advantage two feet eight inches wide, running the whole length of upon stiff and retentive ground, the land must be well the stable. The grates are of the same width as the tank, drained and in good order; and, of course, with these preeach one three feet three inches long, fitting neatly to- requisites, Mr. H. considered its application more effective gether, and with the rest of the floor, and capable of re- there than anywhere else. He would not apply it in very moval one by one for any temporary purpose. The frame hot weather, of course; preferring a murky if not absois made of three by three inch timber, with slats four in-lutely a rainy day, and thought that any previous dilution ches wide, and one and a half inches thick, and two and a half inch spaces between the slats. The distance from the manger to the outer edge of these grates is seven feet eight inches.

Of the underground tank there are six extensions, answering as outlets, one at the end of the building, and the other five along the side, the outlets enabling a man to work at any part of the tank in removing the manure more conveniently than could otherwise be done, and to some

extent entirely upon the outside—a cart backed up to where

he is at work and no doors being open to chill the animals. There is a pump to take as much of the liquid as can thus be drawn off. No bedding beyond the mat is used for the cattle. The more solid parts of the manure are taken away in carts and sometimes mixed, especially if they are not to be immediately applied, with the scrapings from the adjacent public road or the cleanings of the ditches. But it is to the application of this substance to his grass lands, almost without stint, that Mr. H. owes their unflagging, or rather, I may truly say, their constantly increasing productiveness. A dozen good loads spread upon an acre just before a gentle shower, will be washed into the ground like a healing ointment, there being no straw or other coarse material in the way. The time for manuring the meadows is as soon after the mowing as the weather suits; for the pastures, during the winter. The liquid manure is often mixed with the rest for application in this mode; it is also pumped into barrels and put over the pasture in spots where the cattle do not appear to like the grass so well, or where it is coarse and wiry, or on spots a little bare; and three or four doses of this kind in winter or spring, are said to bring on the herbage wonderfully, and indeed seem to change its nature at once. If there is an extra supply of the liquid manure, it may be carried to the source from which the water used for irrigation is distributed, and poured in there to render it still more fruitful of good as it is diffused over the field through the diverging channels already described. In what I have just said about the tank, I omitted to mention that it contained a partition having interstices between the boards just so as to let the liquid part through into a little compartment with which the pump connects, and retain the more solid mass behind. Mr. Horsfall estimates the annual production of manure from cattle, if it is well preserved, as worth at least £5 per head.

Dr. Voelcker had then just published in the Royal Ag. Society's Journal an Essay on Liquid Manure, which, as I subsequently read it after visiting the Cirencester school, appeared to me eminently practical, sound in its general reasoning, and cautious in its conclusions. But Mr. Horsfall thought it calculated to impede rather than increase the use of liquid manure, because Dr. V. classes "soils containing a fair proportion of clay, especially stiff clay soils," among

would then be attended with evil instead of good results. It seems quite possible, however, that upon drier and lighter soils, or in a climate less moist, the reverse should be the case, as Dr. Voelcker argues.

For steaming the food the eattle get, Mr. Horsfall emwhich last in use about two years, and are portable and ploys cans made of block tin holding three bushels each, easily handled. His apparatus accommodates three such

cans, which are filled three times a day for the twenty

milch cows he keeps in winter-the mixture steamed being composed at the time of my visit in the following proportions, the quantity mentioned being that prepared for each cow's daily subsistence: Rape cake...

Bran,.

10 to 12 lbs.

3% lbs.

5 lbs. Malt combs,. ..... 141⁄2 ** Indian meal,. Straw cut to half-inch length.......... This mixture is just dampened-the degree of moisture it contains being a very important matter, and one which experience must determine the food having a greater or less laxative effect, according as the water in it is increased or diminished. Cotton cake Mr. Horsfall has also employed to good advantage, and Indian meal he considers the most fattening food he can get, if it is properly mixed with other substances--indeed the composition of the feed given in winter, unless I am mistaken, would vary from the above by the substitution in it of three or four pounds of Indian corn instead of one. The steam is admitted to this mass for about an hour, and there is really something quite attractive in the odor it exhales-an effect which must be increased in a cold day by its warmth. Mr. Horsfall modifies his feeding materials of course with changes of price at different times. He has in past years used a great deal of bean meal to good advantage, but at present it is too dear for the purpose, and wheat bran and other substitutes are cheaper, as will be perceived from the fact that while wheat has heretofore averaged 36 shillings, and beans 34 shillings per quarter-that is, wheat at $1.75, and beans at $1.06 per bushel, the former was selling last year at $1.25 per bushel, and the latter at $1.56. The cooking of the feed he estimates to cost for fuel, only two pence (four cents) per cow per week, while with but little additional assistance in preparing the food and in milking, one man has the entire charge of the twenty cows. The advantage of feeding straw, in Mr. Horsfall's view, consists in the fact that you thus utilize as fattening agents those elements in it, which would escrpe by fermentation, if it were converted into an ordinary dung heap, while the very ones which alone render it of service as a fertilizer, are those of which the animal economy can make no use, and which are therefore thrown off by it, and collected in bis tanks for the same destination they would otherwise have taken, but performing a double office when they reach it.

The price at which the milk is sold from this establish- have not room to describe at length, of which the subjects ment is four cents a quart; but there not being sufficient were six cows, it became plainly apparent that "the oil in demand to consume it all in this way, what is unsold is their food was inadequate to the supply of the butter and made into butter, perhaps to the amount of fifty pounds fat" produced from them, some portion of which thereper week. There is an old well at the very door of the fore must have been derived from the starch, sugar, &c. dairy room, employed for the sole purpose, as there are of their food. waterworks which supply all that is used, of cooling the Going back, then, to the oxygen, carbon and hydrogen cream in hot weather, before churning-a can containing which make up, in different proportions, starch and sugar, it being let down twenty-six feet the night beforehand, as well as fat,-calculating the amounts thrown off in difwhere the temperature stands at about 46 degrees. The ferent ways by the animal economy, consumed in the prodairy room is purposely a small one, as the temperature cess of respiration, &c., together with what is retained in there can thus be much more easily regulated; and upon the form of increased weight, he was led irresistibly to maintaining it properly, much of his success in butter the conclusion that in supplying this demand, the starch making is believed to depend. There are several tiers of and sugar of the food occupy a rank equivalent to a cershelving around the room, hollow, several inches deep, tain smaller weight of oil, and he thought himself fully jusand lined with sheet lead. A current of water, cold in tified in assuming that the one, (the starch, sugar, &c.,) summer and hot in winter, is kept in constant circulation would go about five-ninths as far as an equal amount of from one to another, and Mr. H. finds that he can thus the other, (the oil)—in other words, that the proportion keep the thermometers that hang at one or two different of 90 to 50 expresses the ratio between the respective points in the apartment, at from fifty-two degrees to fifty-values of these constituents in the food. Adopting this six degrees with great equability. The upper shelf about proportion, he then constructed a table for the purposes the room was covered with an inch or two deep of char- of comparison between different feeding substances, comcoal, which had been found to operate most successfully in the preservation of an atmosphere constantly sweet and pure, without such an admission of the exterior air for purposes of ventilation as would be necessary without this precaution. Unless I have forgotten, however, the sides of the room near the top were also provided with one or two outlets for the escape of any foul air that may rise

from below.

I was particularly interested in what I saw and learned at Mr. Horsfall's, because it showed so plainly the practical nature of the experiments he has undertaken, and because the numerous details with which it furnished me, become of double value in connection with his writings, already to some extent known in this country, from abstracts prepared for the COUNTRY GENTLEMAN at the time of their appearance in the Royal Ag. Society's Journal, and from their partial republication in our State Society's Transactions. There is one point in these Experiments to which I wish to refer more particularly, as it came up for casual discussion not many months ago in the columns of this paper (Mar. 22—vol. xv, p. 192.)

In conversation with

puting the cost of the meat that would be obtained from
100 lbs. of each. To go back again to the straw, he puts
it down as containing one-half of 1 per cent. of oil, and
32 per cent. of starch, sugar, &c.-both together equiva-
lent to an aggregate, according to the above estimate, of
18 lbs. of oil in 100 lbs. of straw.
Mr. Horsfall during my visit, he said, however, that sub-
sequent experiments, conducted (I think) by Mr. LawES,
had led him to modify somewhat the foregoing computa-
tion, and to consider the ratio of two to five as expressing
more nearly than that of 50 to 90, the approximate effi-
cacy of starch, sugar, &c., as an equivalent for oil-an
abatement upon his former estimate, explained by suppos-
ing that some oxygen combines in the process of digestion
with the carbon of the food to form carbonic acid gas, and
is thus thrown off, creating a loss not previously taken into
the account. While this does not affect materially the
results of the previous experiments, it should be placed on
record and borne in mind in consulting them.

With one farther remark I shall conclude. Mr. Mechi, who had found straw as he cooked it with other materials, Mr. Horsfall justly considered it of great importance to apparently of unexpected service, for its price, for feeding the practical farmer and dairyman that he should know purposes,-immediately seized upon Mr. Horsfall's reasonmore accurately the relative values of the different mate- ing as both explaining his own experience and sustaining rials he feeds, in the vital economy of the animal consu- his advocacy of the more economical employment of their ming them. For the purpose of conducting investigations straw by English farmers. He mentioned in a paper pubthat should throw any real light upon the subject, he licly read, that he was getting 18 lbs. of oil out of every thought, moreover, that the investigation should go be- cwt. of straw that he fed, or something to that effect-a yond his laboratory and analyses, to try the animal and its statement which, when put into this form by him, was at food upon the scales, and carefully reduce the results of once discussed and disputed. Finally, in December last, the facts thus obtained and of the reasoning by which they Mr. Nesbit the chemist, came out with a total denial of the were connected, into intelligible form for application to correctness of any such assumption as that on which Mr. practical objects. To take the article of wheat straw for M.'s statement was based, with regard to the equivalent in instance, he finds that chemistry can obtain out of a hun-oil of "the carbon, oxygen and hydrogen in straw." This dred pounds of it only half a pound of oil, while in the nutritive processes that go on in the stomach of the animal, the far larger quantity (32 lbs.) of sugar and starch it contains, seem to be also made available in the production of fat. In what degree they possess an efficacy of this kind had long been a matter of controversy, and its very truth he considered no more than "barely settled." He therefore applied himself to its farther elucidation by experimenting upon it himself and studying the experiments of others. By a course of careful experiment which I

denial, although unsupported by any argument, and appa-
rently founded on no experimental acquaintance with the
subject in its practical bearings, nevertheless furnished
several writers in Great Britain and in this country, with a
new opportunity of decrying Mr. Mechi's pretensions to
practical experience," and of sneering at those who had
been so gullible as to receive anything coming from him
as "reliable." If the pains had been taken to go behind
Mr. Mechi, and examine his authorities, the error,
there was, would have been elsewhere located, or, very

64

if error

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