JO Oct. 1910.] Edi(cafioiial Facilities at the Yiticultural College^. 641 



put upon it. Nature shows us rotation, by providing her seeds with wings, 

 hooks, &c., so that they will be conveyed into different ground. Every 

 crop takes the material it gathers while growing from the soil it is growing 

 in, and all plants feed differently. They each take different proportions of 

 plant food from the .soil. The roots of plants, too, vary greatly: some 

 have shallow roots, like the turnip, and others have long roots like 

 the wheat. 



Land will not produce if the same crop is grown continually upon it, 

 because the available part of the crop's particular food has been used up. 

 The fertility of the soil is gauged by the necessarv part of plant food 

 that is scarcest. There are many advantages gained by rotation. Some 

 of these lesults are: — You get better crops, and the land does not become 

 exhausted; also, insect pests, fungus disea.ses, weeds, &c., are checked. 

 The change of crop prevents any particular ingredient from being used up, 

 and the plant food is economised, and therefore less manure is needed. 

 Pod-bearing plants grown in the rotation enrich the soil and put the land 

 ni better order for the next crop, and with these advantages the stock get 

 Letter food and more variety. Each plant u.ses up a certain proportion of 

 a particular substance, and some use much more than others. A good 

 crop to grow on land is a fallow crop such as rape ; next a cereal crop, 

 ^♦uch as v/heat, then a pod-bearing crop, such as peas, and after that 

 another cereal crop. By this means the ground will be kept in good trim 

 year in and year out. 



THE FLUKE. 



/. Turner, age //. 



The scientitic name of the fluke means two-mouthed. This di.sease was 

 long thought a mystery. In the olden days the people thought it was 

 ■caused by witches, or by the want of good food. If there was plenty of 

 good food they would say it was not the right sort. In Egypt a man was 

 thinking it out, and he thought it was caused by the sheep eating a kind 

 <:i rush. In the year 1855 a man in Victoria imported some prize rams 

 from Germany. When he got these rams they looked all right, but he 

 found they were fluky, and that is how it got introduced into Victoria. In 

 England one million sheep die every year of this parasite. 



The fluke must have favourable moist seasons or else it would not be 

 able to live. In salt marshes it does not appear, because it cannot live 

 where there is salt. In Egypt, when the Nile went down, there would be 

 lovely green grass, and the sheep used to go there because all the other 

 grass was dry. While the sheep were eating this green grass the fluke 

 would be on it, and would pass down into the sheep's stomach. 



The full size of the fluke is about i inch long, \ inch wide and 

 i-i6th of an inch thick. If we were to place 200 eggs end to end they 

 would equal about an inch. When the young fluke enters the liver it is 

 about I -24th of an inch long. A man tried if the eggs would hurt the 

 sheep, but he found it did not affect them. 



If the fluke wants to live it must be near water and find a shellfish. 

 It swims about in the water for one or two days and tries to find a host. 

 If it finds one, and it gets in and finds another fluke, both of them may die 

 and the shellfish too. If it gets in all right, it burrows into the lung cavity 

 and goes through two changes. Then it gets into the water again and loses 

 its tail. After that it forms a cyst over itself and then sticks on to the 

 _g)ass. The sheep come along and eat the grass, and the cyst dissolves. 

 This .sets the fluke free and it goes to the liver. 



