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THE FARMER'S MAGAZINE. 



to bear it in miad — that fcvei-, in every form, is cumu- 

 lative, and that one house in a district, in which the 

 means of prevention are habitually neglected, may, 

 and frequently does, prove the cause of wide- spread 

 disease and death to numbers, innocent of any such 

 neglect, and otherwise likely to be exempt from its con- 

 sequences. Owing to this cause, Dublin, and almost all 

 the towns in Ireland, were never without fever, in one 

 form or other, until the famine of 1847, when the evil 

 reached its maximum, and compelled the authorities to 

 interfere, and establish Boards of Health, that have 

 greatly mitigated the evil. 



In England, the sanitary condition of the rural dis- 

 tricts depends more upon the owners of property than 

 upon the occupiers. Were the landlords to pay more 

 attention to the construction of the cottages, the more 

 cleanly and decent habits of the peasantry would secure 

 them in a great measure from febrile disease. It is 

 the interest of the landlord, too, as well as of the peasant 

 tenant, that the latter should occupy houses well ven- 

 tilated, well drained, and with every domestic nuisance 

 removed as far as possible. This is one of the duties of 



property too much and too frequently neglected, al- 

 though less so than formerly. We have no hesitation 

 in saying, that the most striking proof of the prosperity 

 of a landowner is, the vicinity of a village of neat, 

 cleanly, well-ventilated cottages, inhabited by a healthy 

 and contented peasantry, whose comforts and wants are 

 cared for by the owner of the " great house" near by, 

 and who, in i-eturn, are bound to him by ties which 

 constitute a moral obligation of the most direct and in- 

 fluential kind. 



No country is absolutely exempt from epidemic or 

 endemic disease. Irremediable and general causes of 

 an atmospheric nature exist to produce the former; 

 whilst local ones of an equally unremovable nature, such 

 as the vicinity of a marsh, a stagnant lake, or a damp, 

 low wood, are productive of the latter. But these 

 effects may in all cases be mitigated by the care of a 

 good landlord, as increased by the neglect of a bad one. 

 The former, whilst doing his own duty, will enforce that 

 of his tenant by compelling him to observe the means 

 of health and comfort in his domestic habits. 



THE GROWTH AND USE OF MANGOLD WURZEL. 



Losing faith in the soundheartedness of their bulbous 

 friend the turnip— surmising, perhaps, that his flesh 

 has begun to grow too ligneous and lymphatic when 

 nourished more with " bone" than muscle, more with 

 ** Lawes" than with the " old farm-yard" — root growers 

 have this year sown an unexampled breadth of mangold 

 wurzel. One farmer of our acquaintance (not in Essex, 

 or any other peculiarly mangold country) has two- 

 fifths of his fallow cropping under this root; his next 

 neighbour has twenty-five acres; and so on throughout 

 the district, where hitherto only patches have been 

 cultivated — as though the farmers had been fearful of 

 being caught by dangerous weather late in autumn, or 

 else did not know how to secure and utilise these valu- 

 able roots. Our hopes of the spring have been realized ; 

 our labour in watching lax fingers dropping six seeds 

 instead of one into each dibble-hole, or our contrivance 

 exercised in working the matchless water-drill, have 

 been well rewarded by a bulby and healthy produce. 

 Many a light-land four-course farmer is gazing with 

 dismay upon the mean bulbs of his turnip fields, and 

 dares not count how many in every hundred plants are 

 either developed into fangs or pine-apple necks, or, 

 hydra like, have more than one head, or are knotted 

 into masses of tumorous excrescence. But those of us 

 who have soil better than thin flinty sand, and have 

 ventured rather extensively with beets, arc busily en- 

 gaged in taking up and making safe a crop that will 

 amply repay our trouble, and that relieves our disap- 

 pointment about the poor turnip crop. 



On some naturally-poor soil, too moist for good 



sheep-breeding, and where the roop crop is therefore 

 not a prominent feature in the rotation, we have man- 

 golds grown alongside of swedes, both tilled for, ma- 

 nured for, kc, as nearly as may be alike ; and a lesson 

 may be gleaned from the result : — A luxuriant plant of 

 swedes, mildewed down to some ten tons per acre: a 

 good plant of mangolds matured into a crop of thirty 

 tons per acre, as estimated by weighing the roots on 

 the fortieth part of an acre. Not a singular case, mind 

 you ; but just a similar state of things to that existing 

 generally throughout the country. Our fifteen acres of 

 swedes will soon vanish through the slicer and pulper, 

 when the cold weather comes : our fifteen acres of 

 mangold supply us with at least four hundred tons of 

 fine-fleshed roots, which sheep in the field, and cattle, 

 pigs, and farm horses at the farmstead, may devour at 

 the rate of three tons a day in the late winter, and dur- 

 ing the inclement interregnum between winter and 

 spring, when Boreas blusters over the shivering land. 

 But " mangolds are so expensive to grow." Not a bit 

 of it. We are busy taking up just now, without hin- 

 dering wheat sowing in consequence ; and the method 

 and expenses shall be forthcoming next week. Mean- 

 while our readers may be meditating, and making up 

 their minds to sow more largely next season. It may 

 be instructive to remember how this same mangold 

 wurzel was treated in its earliest cultivation. 



The field beet (not the red garden beet, which had 

 long been common enough) was introduced from Ger- 

 many into France in the year 1784, under the name of 

 la ravine dc disette, and the English agriculturist first 



