378 ANNUAL RECORD OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. 



deficient in albuminoids. To use these coarse hays economic- 

 ally, otlier materials rich in digestible albuminoids should be 

 added. Such are oil-cakes, beans, pease, bran, etc. And Pro- 

 fessor Storer very justly remarks that "there are many places 

 where it would be not merely good practice, but really excel- 

 lent farming, to feed out upon the farm the hay from coarse 

 natural herbage, with the addition of small quantities of the 

 more concentrated forms of food, and send oft' from the farm, 

 in so far as might be practicable, the more costly upland hay, 

 to be marketed like any other merchantable product." 



ARTIFICIAL DRYING OF HAY AND GRAIN. 



Considerable interest has been excited in ao-ricultural cir- 

 cles in England in regard to the apparatus invented by Mr. 

 William Alfred Gibbs for drying hay and grain artificially 

 during damp weather. The apparatus consists of a porta- 

 ble stove, constructed of plate iron, and is surmounted by a 

 fan which is driven by a belt from a three horse-power port- 

 able steam-engine. The fan draws all the heated air and 

 gases from the coke fire, together with a volume of warmed 

 air, which passes through a chamber surrounding the inner 

 chamber of the stove, and blows the hot current, at a tem- 

 perature of 400 Fahr. or more, into the dryer. This resem- 

 bles in general shape a straw elevator, consisting of a sheet- 

 iron trough six feet in breadth, twenty feet long if mounted 

 on wheels as a portable carriage, or forty or fifty feet long 

 if a fixture. The trough is raised at one end at a low angle, 

 so that hay fed in at the upper end farthest from the stove 

 shall slowly travel to the lower end near the stove, this be- 

 ing assisted by a reciprocating motion given to the bottom 

 of the trouo-h. A ridsje of triansfular section, runnino; alonsj 



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the middle of the trough, divides it into two almost semicir- 

 cular channels, so that the hay passes down in two streams; 

 the hot air issues through two slit apertures, one on each 

 side of the base of the middle ridge, and for the entire length 

 of the machine, and the hay is kept continually stirred and 

 lightened up, over the hot blast, by a number of small iron 

 stirrers contrived to imitate the action of forks worked by 

 hands. The London l^lmes, in an article on this subject, re- 

 marks of the experiment of Mr. Gibbs, that partly made but 

 wet hay passed through the machine was converted at once 



