SHEEP HUSBANDRY IN THE SOUTH. 31 



When intelligent sheep-farming is practised on these now 

 waste pine lands, it is believed that it will develop a value in 

 them never yet conceived of. Sheep-farming has made the 

 chalky downs of England, once arid wastes, gardens of ver- 

 dure. There are no soils so responsive to manure as those of 

 a light, sandy character. The most productive lands in all 

 the United States are in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where 

 the writer resides. Originally sandy plains, bearing a few 

 pitch-pines, they have been converted into market gardens. 

 Covered with glass, or hot beds, in the winter, and heaped up 

 with manure when the glass is removed, they bear successive 

 crops through the whole year, and yield as high as four thou- 

 sand dollars per acre in a year. The Tertiary lands of the 

 South contain many elements wanting in our Northern pine 

 plains (especially in the subsoil), as they contain organic re- 

 mains. A scientific farmer in Louisiana regards the pine lands, 

 when made rich as they can be with pine straw, folding sheep, 

 and ploughing in green crops to supply organic matter, as the 

 most pleasant lands to cultivate, and the best lands in the 

 State. 



It is of such land as this that Longfellow speaks in 

 " Evangeline": 



"Here no stony ground provokes the wrath of farmer, 

 Smoothly the ploughshare runs through the soil, like a keel through the water." 



Sheep for Mixed Husbandry. The other and more impor- 

 tant branch of sheep husbandry, in its relations to the im- 

 provement of a country, is that where the culture of sheep is 

 made auxiliary to a mixed husbandry. The highest advan- 

 tage of this system is the improvement of the land. As this 

 paper may come under the eye of persons less familiar with 

 the subject than our habitual readers, we may be allowed to 

 repeat facts before stated in our pages. 



Sheep are the only animals which do not exhaust the land 

 upon which they feed, but permanently improve it. Horned 

 cattle, especially cows in milk, by continued grazing, ulti- 

 mately exhaust the pastures of their phosphates. In England, 

 the pastures of the county of Chester, famous as a cheese dis- 



