POTATOES. 39 



Question. Has Gov. Holbrook any plow that will give you 

 your ideal of pulverization, at one operation, with a light pair 

 of horses or oxen. 



Mr. Gould. Well, sir, the most perfect plow that Gov. Hol- 

 brook has is his Michigan plow, No. QQ, I think he calls it. That 

 is the most thorough pulverizer of any. He has another one, 

 which he calls his lap furrow plow, which does its work very 

 satisfactorily, and which can be run with one pair of horses. 

 I have seen his No. 66, where he goes twelve inches deep, 

 drawn by a pair of horses, but they were very powerful Con- 

 estoga horses. His lap-furrow plow, however, can be easily 

 drawn eight inches deep by a pair of horses, but its pulveriza- 

 tion is not so perfect as his No. 6Q. That was the result of 

 our experiments. 



Gov. Hyde. What was the nature of the soil in which you 

 experimented ? 



Mr. Gould. Our chief experiments were conducted at 

 Utica, on the farm of Mr. Butterfield. It was thought desir- 

 able to repeat the experiments on soil of a different character, 

 and we then went to the Connecticut river. The first series 

 of experiments was conducted on a stiff, heavy soil at Utica ; 

 the second, on a sandy loam, also at Utica ; and the third, on 

 the tenacious loams of the Connecticut river ; and they were 

 conducted with the utmost thoroughness and fairness, many 

 weeks being devoted to them. Going along before the plow 

 entered the furrow, we put two pegs down, one on each side 

 of the furrow. Then we made the horses walk very slowly, 

 and as the plow passed along, we watched for the point where 

 the transverse disruption took place, and found that it always 

 took place instantaneously at passing one given point. We 

 then measured off the slice, and tried to see how many inches 

 in advance the one was of the other, and we found that on the 

 most tenacious soil of Utica, this had to be reckoned eight 

 inches in advance ; whereas, in some more loamy soils, three 

 and a quarter inches was the average required ; and in some 

 dry clay soils, I think it was only two inches. But you see 

 that this would make an exact test of the degree of tension 



