1868.] Agriculture. : 367 
reported from Holstem, which has been designed with a view to 
escape the so-called potato disease. He grows his potato plants in 
hillocks, a yard apart every way, planting the tubers individually 
on earth over a spadeful of compost or manure in each spot, and 
taking care that each tuber is planted with the eye downwards. 
The shoots rise ina circle round the tuber, and in the course of their 
growth they are separated wider by additions of earth in the 
middle of this circle, and fall down into the intervening spaces 
whence the earth has been removed for this purpose. ‘There is 
thus ultimately a set of hillocks of which the tops are bare and the 
base surrounded with foliage ; and the idea is that the alleged freedom 
from disease which ensues must be owing to the blight fungus 
being washed downwards into the intervals between the plants, and 
away from the crop of young tubers which remain under the central 
hillock of bare earth. 
The spring time of the year always brings round discussions 
of the injury done to farmers by fraud in the seed and the manure 
trades. It isalleged that the phrase “ nett seed” is a common one 
among wholesale seedsmen, indicating that seed which is not “ nett,” 
and which therefore must be fraudulently mixed with dead and 
worthless additions, is also commonly delivered. There can be no 
doubt that the immense quantities of seed used in order to obtain 
an agricultural crop—often ten and twenty-fold the quantity which 
would, if all would grow, supply more than plants enough—can be 
explained only on the theory that a very large quantity of seed does 
not grow at all. Manures, in like manner, are the subject of 
fraudulent admixture; and sales by auction, professedly of damaged 
cargoes, often take-in the unwary who think to catch a bargain by 
cheap purchases of worthless stuff that is really dear at any price. 
Some service is done by repeatedly calling attention to the risks of 
this kind which the farmer runs; and we therefore mention the 
subject here. 
The theory of the under-drainage of land has recently received 
some discussion in the agricultural journals. The policy of leaving 
the upper ends of pipe-drains open to the air has been defended on 
the ground that it facilitates the passage of water through the pipe. 
The idea seems to us an entire mistake. The sole agency in the 
drainage of land is the weight of the water in the soil, which ensures 
its passage downwards and outwards, as soon as any channel of 
escape for it is opened. If the soil be air-tight, so that an air- 
passage is required to the underground pipe at the upper end of it, 
still more must it be water-tight, and then, of course, incapable of 
being drained at all. But no soil isim such a plight as this. It 
only needs that a channel be cut three or four feet deep in any soil, 
and any water that is in it will begin to ooze and trickle through it, 
and thus establish that movement of the rain-water from the surface 
