1866. | Agriculture. 385 
acids. And we believe that the agricultural public are greatly 
indebted to Dr. Voelcker, the chemist of the Royal Agricultural 
Society of England, and to Mr. Walter Crum, F.B.S., for that 
distinction urged by them between disinfectants and antiseptics, 
which does not appear to have received due attention in the 
recommendations of the Cattle Plague Commissioners. 
Reference was made last quarter to the then impending attempt 
to collect statistics of our live stock. The returns have since been 
published, and we learn that on the 5th of March (when, however, 
neither the calving nor the lambing season was over) we had the 
following quantity of live stock in the country :— 
ENUMERATED, 1866. 
Cattle. | Sheep. Pigs. 
England ° ° 5 ° . 3,307,034 15,124,541 2,066,299 
Wales. . = 4 . e 541,401 1,668,663 191,604 
Islands ° = A ° . 17,700 57,685 22,887 
Scotland c “ 5 : E 937,411 5,255,077 219,716 
Treland ° . . : . 3,493,414 3,688,742 1,299,893 
Total - = . . §,316,960 25,794,708 3,800,399 
This amounts, as regards Great Britain, to about 10 cattle of 
all ages, 40 sheep, and 6 pigs, to every 100 acres of England ; and 
to 5 cattle, 28 sheep, and 1 pig, to every hundred acres of Scot- 
land, of which, of course, so much larger a proportion is waste and 
moorland. Another table in the Government returns on this sub- 
ject indicates the corresponding live-stock population of other 
countries. Comparing it, however, not with the acreage, but with 
the human population of the several countries, the extent of their 
dairy husbandry is very strikingly illustrated by this table, which 
shows, that while there is only one cow for every nine persons in 
Great Britain and Ireland, there is one for every two in Denmark, 
one for every three in Holstein, one for every three-and-a-half in 
Sweden, Holland, Prussia and Saxony; one for every six in 
Austria, and one for every six-and-a-half in France. The uni- 
versality of the cattle plague in Cheshire is shown in these returns by 
the number of cattle in that county, 95,844, as compared with 90,439, 
which is the number on those farms where the disease had appeared. 
The meat supply of the country has received ample discussion 
during the past quarter at the hands of both local and central 
societies. The increase of fertility by both deeper tillage and more 
liberal manuring, the adoption of special rotations of crop, and, in 
particular, the cultivation of green crops in succession to one 
another ; the use of potatoes, and of home-grown grain, as cattle 
food; the selection of fitting breeds and animals and their 
