490 
straight as an arrow; the horse-hoe, cultivating a breadth wide as that 
stirred by acommon harrow, passes once, sometimes twice, with care and 
celerity between the drills, gently stirring the soil and uprooting weeds, 
while gangs of hands subsequently pass through the fields to extirpate 
the larger remaining weeds, which would otherwise go to seed and re- 
duce future productiveness. Judicious rotation usually comes in to 
economize in the highest degree and utilize most beneficially the expens- 
ive stores of plant-food assimilated by the various crops. 
Almost universally commercial fertilizers are used, not as a main de- 
pendence in fertilization, but as an adjunct of and complement to the 
home manures obtained by the feeding of cattle and sheep, and to the | 
various resources of clovering and green-manuring. It is a confidently 
received opinion that paying productiveness cannot be permanently 
maintained without the consumption of a considerable proportion of the 
farm products of domestic animals. This opinion is accredited with a 
common-sense basis, and has the sanction of long and successful expe- 
rience; in the case of the farmer of average skill and of traditional 
practice it is assuredly the ouly safe rule to follow, as a matter of econo- 
my in fertilization; except in peculiar circumstances of soiland situation, 
where suitable artificial aids are abundant and cheap, it is a theory 
which should be closely adhered to in practice. 
EXCLUSIVE ARTIFICIAL MANURING.—There are examples of bold and, 
for the time at least, successful practice in depending almost exclusively 
upon commercial fertilizers to keep up the fertility of the soil, from 
which all its products are sold and carried off year after year. While in 
England, the present summer, the writer visited the scene of a remark- 
able example of this kind, a brief history of which may be profitably un- 
folded for suggestion and inquiry, if not for imitation. 
Mr. John Prout, a London merchant, who had been bred a farmer in 
England, and had for years of his early life cultivated a farm in Canada, 
bought in 1861 two old and somewhat dilapidated farms in Hertford- 
shire, near Sawbridgeworth, about thirty miles northeast from the me- 
tropolis. They comprised 460 acres, the soil of which was a eclay-loam, 
which had been worked only three or four inches in depth, was “ clover- 
sick,” and so unproductive that it was sold at the low price of £35 per 
acre. The neighbors were inclined to regard with derision the expec- 
tations of the city farmer, and freely prophesied a loss of patience or 
money, or both, and the abandonment of the effort. His first move- 
ment was the destruction of most of the hedge-rows, which divided the 
land into fifty-one irregular, small, and inconvenient parcels, thus saving, 
in the space oceupied by hedges and ditches, 16 acres, at a cost of £311 
for the improvement. A further yain of 2} acres was made by filling a 
moat and ponds. 
This area was divided into twelve fields. Exchanges of land were 
effected and lines straightened to economize the work of culture by the use 
of steam. A thorough system of tile-draining was then constructed, and 
an open ditch cut at one point to facilitate surface-drainage. These im- 
provements brought the cost of the investment to £59, or $250, per acre. 
Being now ready for soil preparation, he bought a set of John Fowler & 
Co.’s steam-plowing tackle, at $6,000, and kept it at work much of the 
time, in 1862 and 1863, plowing 1,401 acres, sub-soiling 277, and scari- 
fying 480; in all, 2,158 acres in those seasons. Mr. Prout says: ‘ Plow 
often, plow deep, keep constantly plowing, was my motto for the first 
few years.” The cost of this plowing, in comparison with horse-power, 
is deemed less than the same depth of pulverization by the old method, 
though more per acre than the shallow culture formerly practiced. Some 
