( +3866 ) [July, 
CHRONICLES OF SCIENCE. 
1. AGRICULTURE. 
Bryonp the ordinary labours of the field preceding and succeeding 
seed time, which have this year been carried on under favourable 
circumstances,*the subjects principally occupying agricultural atten- 
tion during the past quarter have been rather of a social, or even 
political, than of a practical and scientific nature; and they are the 
less proper for discussion, or even enumeration here. We may, 
however, refer to the condition of the agricultural labourer as one 
of them. It has been properly enough characterized as extremely 
unsatisfactory in many parts of the country, where the ignorance 
of the class is very great and their wages very low. Schools are, 
however, bearing fruit everywhere, and the proportion of country 
workmen who can read and write a letter, is every year increasing ; 
and the wages received by them, though still various in different 
districts (indicating the strength of tie which still holds the 
labouring population to their parish), is less various than the mere 
money paid to them would lead one to suppose. There are many 
districts where the money wages are declared to be only 9s. or 10s., _ 
or even less, a week, in which a man is better off than he would 
be in a town with 20s. to 25s. weekly. The real payment for ser- 
vices includes in the former case, cottage and garden, 5/. or 61. for 
the harvest month, constant payment all the year, and the oppor- 
tunity both of earning triple wages at occasional piecework and of 
buying cheap flour and fuel. In an instance known to us near 
Rochford, Essex, where the offer of a 5/. prize at length brought 
forth a properly vouched year’s cash-account of the income and ex- 
penditure of an agricultural labourer who was receiving nominally 
11s. a week, the actual receipts for the year exceeded 502. Those 
who compare the nominal wages of the labourer in town and 
country, are thus contrasting things of entirely different character, and 
are in danger of misleading themselves and others. Good service 
will, nevertheless, we readily admit, be done by any one who shall 
set himself to help good working-men to improve their circumstances, 
by sending them from over-populated districts to places where 
labourers are more wanted, and wages accordingly are higher; and 
this has been done of late by the Rey. Canon Girdlestone, at Hal- 
berton, in Devonshire, to an extent which has at length excited 
public attention. 
Returning now to our task as mere chroniclers of agricultural 
events, we have to mention Mr. Giilich’s mode of potato growing, 
