250 Management of Grass Land. 



exhalations, and the refuse would be removed by water or other 

 carriage some miles into the country, to await under sheds the 

 farmer's season of use. This manure could be screened and 

 applied by distributors, and would produce crops of grass which 

 experience ahme will enable us to estimate. Every element of 

 grass is contained in this manure in large abundance, and w liile 

 its preparation formed a sanitary improvement of much value to 

 towns, its use would be a boon of enormous value to the country. 



8t. Andrews, Wakefield. 



XII. — On Layiufj-doion Land to Grass, and its subsequent 

 Manaf/cment. By H. S. TnOMPSOX. 



NeAKLY a century and a half have expired since the sagacious 

 Dean of St. Patricks penned the well-known and often quoted 

 maxim which so pithily points out the importance of growing 

 two ears of corn in the plai;e of one, and two blades of grass 

 where but one had been before. Whole nations of cultivators 

 have applied themselves to the accomplishment of this object, 

 — a task apparently so insignificant in its dimensions, but really 

 so immense in its influence on the well-being and even on the 

 destiny of large portions of the human race. If any records had 

 been kept of tlie results accomplished, it would doubtless be 

 found that at the close of the eventful century and a half above 

 alluded to not only two but many ears of corn do actually flourish 

 in the room of one, and contemporaneously with this improve- 

 ment in our agriculture a corresponding advance has been made 

 in arts, in arms, and all the other attributes of greatness, so that 

 the title of Grea^ applied to our little island can no longer be con- 

 sidered a misnomer, even though its people be compared with the 

 mightiest nations either of the present or the past. The first 

 portion of Dean Swift's maxim has, then, been amply realized : 

 the two ears of corn have been grown, and the cultivators, in 

 common with the whole nation, have reaped their reward. 



But what of the Grass? Few faimers could, we fear, give a 

 satisfactory answer ; few could say that they had even tried to do 

 more than keep their grass-land up to the mark, that mark being 

 the old landmark of quantity and quality. In short, they have 

 only tried to produce the same number of blades of grass as 

 heretofore. Fifty years ago, previous to the most striking im- 

 provements in our arable farming, Arthur Young estimated the 

 best meadow land to produce 5 tons of hay pfr acre per annum 

 (at two mowings), and the best grazing-land to feed an ox of 90 

 to 100 stone (14 lbs.) and 1 large Lincolnshire sheep per acre ! 



