quid on one side. He bought some dung and bones in Liverpool, but not much. He es- 

 teemed bones most highly, and said they did immense good hereabout. They made a 

 sweeter, stronger, and more permanent pasture. Where he had applied them twelve years 

 ago, at the rate of a ton to an acre, he could see their effects yet. He took me into an ad- 

 joining field, which, he said, was one of the best pastures in the village. It had been 

 ploughed in narrow lands, and the ridges left high, when it was laid down. The sward 

 was thiclier, better bottomed, than any I ever saw in America. He sowed about a bushel 

 of grass seeds to the acre, seeding down with oats. For cheese pasture, he valued white 

 clover more than anything else, and had judged, from the taste of American cheese, that 

 we did not have it. For meadows to be mowed for hay, he preferred sainfoin and ray- 

 grass. He had lately underdrained some of his lowest land with good effect. His soil is 

 mostly a stiff clay resting on a ledge of rocks." 



Our agricultural readers, particularly those in grazing districts, will be especially interest- 

 ed in the following more detailed account of the use of bone manure on pasture lands, and 

 the more, now that the beds of native phosphate of lime, discovered in New -Jersey and 

 New- York, bid fair to give us a supply of this fertilizer at a rate that will enable us to use 

 it profitablj' : 



"The farms in the country over which we walked in Cheshire, were generally small, 

 less, I should think, than one hundred acres. Frequently the farmer's family supplied 

 all the labor upon them, — himself and his sons in the field, and his wife and daughters 

 in the dairy — except that in the harvest month, one or two Irish reapers would be em- 

 ployed. The cows, in the summer, are kept during the day in distant pastures, and al- 

 ways at night in a home lot. During the cheese making season, which on these small farms 

 is from the first of May till November, they are driven home and fastened in shippens, or 

 sheds, between five and six o'clock, morning and night, and then milked by the girls, 

 sometimes assisted by the men. On a farm of one hundred acres, fifteen to twenty cows 

 are kept, and three persons are about an hour in milking them. From twenty to thirty 

 gallons of milk, (say six quarts from each cow,) is expected to be obtained on an average, 

 and about one pound of dried cheese from a gallon of milk. From two to five cwt. (of 

 112 lbs.) of cheese, may be made from the milk of each cow during the year. Three cwt. 

 is thought a fair return on the best farms. In a moderately dry and temperate summer, 

 more cheese is made than in one which is very wet. 



" The pastures are generally looked upon as permanent; the night pastures are some- 

 times absolutely so, as it supposed that the}' have not generally been broken up for many 

 hundred years. During the last ten years the pasture lands have been very greatly, and, 

 as they tell me, almost incredibly improved by the use of bone dust. It is applied in 

 the quantity of from twenty to forty cwt. on an acre, as top dressing, and I was told that 

 pastures on which it had been applied at the rate of a ton to an acre, eight or nine years 

 ao'o, had continued as good, (or able on an average of the years to bear as many cows,) as 

 similar land top-dressed with farm-yard dung every two years, probably at the rate of 

 thirty cubic yards to an acre. There seems to be no doubt at all, that land to which inch 

 bones were applied ten years ago, are yet much the better for it. They are usually ap- 

 plied in April, and the ground is lightly pastured, or perhaps not at all, until the follow- 

 ing year. The effect, the farmers say, is not merely to make the growth stronger, but to 

 make it sweeter; the cattle will even eat the weeds, which before they would not taste of. 

 However, in poor land especially, it is found to encourage the growth of the more valua- 

 sses more than that of the weeds, so that the latter are crowded out, and a clean, 

 clo.se turf is formed. If the ground has been drained, all these improvements are 



