1866. | Agriculture. 251 
than 120 boys, the sons of farmers or intending an agricultural life, 
competed for the Society’s prizes at the recent Cambridge University 
Local Examinations; and it is believed that some agricultural 
interest has been excited, and some agricultural good therefore been 
achieved. We believe that the efficiency of the Agricultural 
Society’s prizes will be much greater, and their results will be more 
immediate, when they are offered exclusively for such evidence as 
examinations can test of competency, proficiency, and excellence 
(not in the several branches of ordinary school training, but) in the 
several departments of a strictly agricultural and _ professional 
education. 
The condition of the agricultural labourer under the systems of 
ayments in “kind” and by money respectively has been discussed. 
n Dorsetshire the payment is very largely by perquisites of various 
kind—cottage and garden free, wheat at a reduced price, &c., and 
only partly by a weekly money wage ; and only the last particular 
being published, an undue impression of the hardships of the 
Dorsetshire labourer has arisen. In many districts of Scotland, too, 
wages are to a great extent given in meal, in a cow’s keep, and so 
on, and the result, they say, is advantageous for the labourmg man. 
Lord Shaftesbury declares the advantages of the somewhat similar 
system in Dorsetshire. But these advantages are altogether denied 
by the Rey. Lord 8. G. Osborne, another Dorsetshire philanthropist ; 
and we entirely sympathize with the latter in the belief that, as we 
have no right to treat labourmg men as if they were children, 
incapable of looking after their own interest, or to enforce a system 
of payment upon them lest they should waste their means, so also, 
any such enforcement tends to the maintenance of a childish help- 
lessness and improvidence, out of which trouble and distress are 
sure to grow. 
The report by Mr. Lawes, of Rothamsted, on the experiments 
undertaken for Government to determine the relative values of 
unmalted and malted barley as food for stock, has been published. 
From the extent of these experiments and the great care with which 
they were carried out, we should judge the result to be entirely 
trustworthy. And it clearly proves that the waste of nutritive 
material in the process of malting is so great, that whether the dry 
matter of malt or that of barley, by itself, be the more nutritive or 
not, there clearly is less food in the malt derived from a given 
quantity of barley than there was in the barley from which it waa 
made. 
