CONDITION OF AGRICULTURE. 323 



up by the rootlets, and it followed that the more thoroughly the 

 soil in which they grew was disintegrated, the more abundant 

 would 1)0 the pasture [as he called it] to which their fibres would 

 have access." In the culture of wheat, he sowed in drills on 

 ridges formed for the purpose, and the interval of four feet and 

 six inches between the ridges was stirred by a horse-hoe, and 

 the space between the rows, on the ridge, was cultivated by a 

 hand-hoe. He speaks of growing thirteen successive crops of 

 wheat upon the same soil without diminution. The same mode 

 of culture was resorted to for the turnip, and his system, after 

 meeting much opposition, came at last to be adopted for the 

 cultivation of that root. The merit of the system has been 

 latterly much discussed, in lectures before the Royal Agricul- 

 tural Society, and some interesting experiments have been 

 recently made tending to prove its value in growing wheat. 



" A Mr. Laws, of Rothamstead, has devoted portions of a field 

 to wheat and turnips in the following manner: an acre of land 

 is annually scarified and cleaned so soon as the crop is removed, 

 whereupon it is ploughed and drilled with wheat. The annual 

 average produce of the acre, without manure, is sixteen bush- 

 els, below which it has not been reduced by ten successive crops. 

 The soil is a strong clay loam, resting, at a depth of five or six 

 feet, upon chalk. In the case of turnips, treated in the same 

 way, they cease after a few years to grow larger than radishes, 

 nor will any amount or variety of manure that has been tried 

 obtain a second succession of crops equal to the first. With 

 wheat, on the contrary, the addition of four hundred pounds of 

 Peruvian guano at once doubles the crop. The land yielding 

 thirty-four bushels per acre for six or seven successive crops." 



These experiments go to show that the common opinion that 

 grain exhausts the fertility of soils more rapidly than the green 

 crops, must be received with some qualification ; and that clay 

 lands, by the addition of suitable manures, thorough tillage, 

 and diligent removal of weeds, may stand an indefinite succes- 

 sion of grain crops. And in this connection it should be re- 

 marked, that in England the corn cro'ps are, at the present day, 

 far superior, both in quality and quantity, to those of any pre- 

 ceding period ; whereas, potatoes and turnips have become so 

 precarious as to induce a belief in their ultimate failure. 



These experiments, disproving, as they certainly do to some 



