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FARMERS' REGISTER— SCHOOLS FOR FARMERS' SONS. 



their principles, and he is not up to his work unless 

 he can tell whether his tools are well or ill made, 

 and can see the cause ol any detect in their work- 

 ings. If, by a little here and there a man can 

 6ave the labor of one horse on a farm, it is a great 

 thing. The multitudes of machines vvhich are 

 rising like meteors round us, should, in this branch 

 of science, at all events, unteach us the Ibolish 

 vanity of supposing our present practices to be the 

 best possible. In the West Indies they are no 

 doubt as well convinced of the excellence of their 

 agriculture as we are, and they have not generally 

 introduced either the plough or the wheel-barrow! 

 My authority for this is the writer of a lively 

 sketch of their manners and customs, entitled 

 "Marly, or a Planter's Life in the West Indies." 

 He says, "after a week or five days of this kind of 

 labor, very distressing to the people, few acres in- 

 deed were gone over, although there were rather 

 more than° 100 negroes employed, one day with 

 another, digging only these holes in the ground. 

 Had the ground been previously tilled with the 

 plough, mi amazingly gieater quantity of these 

 holes could have been made in one day than it was 

 possible for the people to etiect in three or four in 

 the manner in which they worked." — "To carry 

 the manure to the required spot was the task of the 

 negresses, and the weak negroes, who, with some 

 littTe help at the manure-heaps, had to fill their 

 baskets and then cany them on their heads at a 

 pretty smart pace, and empty them into the holes. 

 This employment of bearing the manure none of 

 the carriers at all relished, but the stimulus of the 

 whip, and the daily encouragement of a dram of 

 rum, effected wonders. Had the people been fur- 

 nished with wheel-barrows, they could have per- 

 formed their tasks with ease." 



It need not be inlijrred from this, that I suppose 

 our practice to be as faulty as theirs. It is adduced 

 for no other purpose than to rouse people Irom the 

 lethargic dream in which we are all too apt to in- 

 dulge, that the established practice is the iie plus 

 ultra of perfection. 



j^ccnunts. — In a business embracing so many 

 particulars as farming, it is essential to be able to 

 distinguish the profit and loss upon each. No- 

 thmg is more easy or more common than for a 

 man who keeps no accounts, to continue for a 

 series of years to lose money upon some particular 

 department without knowing it, or, which is almost 

 as bad, to employ his time and capital in less profi- 

 table speculation, when he might have applied 

 them to such as were more so. A farmer grows 

 many sorts of crop, and keeps several species of an- 

 imals — breeding some and buying others, and uses 

 many kinds of manure. Assuming that he has a 

 general profit of 10 per cent, at the year's end, how 

 is he to tell Avhether all the branches of his business 

 havecontributedrateably to this result — how, I say, 

 is be to tell this without accounts? The cost of 

 one acre of corn, for example, is by no means selt- 

 evident; it is "compounded of many simples, extract- 

 ed from many objects," — rent, tithe, taxes, seed, 

 and tillage — horses' keep and man's keep — rates 

 for the poor, the church, and the highways — and 

 so with every other crop. Suppose now, that, in 

 the case of oats, all the items of expenditure accu- 

 rately set down shall amount to £5 15s. an acre, 

 and that the crop shall sell for £5 10s. Upon 

 40 acres here would be a loss of £ 10 a-year; but 

 without setting down the eeveral items which com- 



pose the cost, and adding them together, how is a 

 man to tell within 5s. w'hat his acre of oats cost 

 him? He may know that his acre cost him about 

 £5 or £6, but" in this very about lies the essence 

 of the mischief. About £5 or £6; now if the 

 selling price were £5 10s., the former supposi- 

 tion would give a profit, and the latter a loss, of £20 

 a-year; and thus any njan may, and multitudes 

 do, continue to the end of their lives carrying on 

 branches of business by which they lose money 

 unconsciously. The same observations apply to 

 manures brought on the farm. Price, carriage, la- 

 bor, &c. all reckoned, bone-dust may be 5&. an 

 acre dearer or cheaper than stable-dung — but 

 without counting up the cost of each item that 

 forms the price, a man may be ignorant of thia 

 difference, and so may lose 5s. an acre. It is by a 

 few shillings gained here and saved there, that a 

 farmer makes his profit. It is no exaggerated 

 estimate to suppose that these petty items may 

 often make a difference of 10 per cent, at the 

 year's end, and that so, one man may make a liv- 

 ing on the same farm where another would fail.- 

 A knowledge of these details, therefore, is useful, 

 and is to be acquired by a system of accounts. 

 Neariy alUed to, if not identical with, accounts, is 

 a facility at all the common operations of arithme- 

 tic, and the storing in the mind of certain arithme- 

 tical results, which may serve as the basis of fu- 

 ture calculations. The multiplication table is a 

 familiar example of the vast importance of this 

 prepared and portable knowledge. The com- 

 monest operations of arithmetic could scarcely be 

 carried on without the intuitive readiness v/ith 

 which the produce of any two of the numbers 

 under twelve have been made to occur to the 

 mind; but the principle is capable of an application 

 much wider than it has received. The propor- 

 tions existing between the numerical pans into 

 which the year, the acre, the pound sterling, and 

 the ton weight are divided, might be impressed 

 on the mind, and, as it were, burnt in by contin- 

 ual repetition; as, lor example, the weight of an 

 acre of turnijjs is a fact which it is desirable to 

 know, and which is ascertained in five minutes, if 

 we bear in mind that, for every pound on the 

 square yard, there are 2 tons 3 cwt. 14 lbs. on the 

 acre; and we shoidd in a similar manner be able to 

 tell without effort, what breadth of turnips would 

 keep a sheep or a cow for a year. The number o 

 inches in a square or cubic yard, and of yards in 

 an acre, the number of pounds in a ton, and the 

 proportion existing between the days in the year 

 and the common subdivisions of our measures of 

 weight, capacity, superficies, and value, suggest 

 themselves as instances. A number of" these 

 facts and relations being well impressed on the 

 recollection of boys at school, they would come 

 in after life to the calculations necessary to estab- 

 lish knowledge instead of guesses res])ecting the 

 affairs of their farms, so well pi'eparcd as to make 

 that occurintuitively and without labor, vvhich men, 

 not so prepared, could only come at with much la- 

 bor, or perhaps not at all. There is scarcely any thing 

 easier than the use of logarithms, but we are cer- 

 tainly not all qualified to have invented^hem. 



There still remain other sciences from which 

 instances as pregnant might be drawn. Vegeta- 

 ble Phsiology, Meteorology, Geology, Hydrosta- 

 tics; but it is not by the endless multiplication of in- 

 stances that attention can be enchained or convic- 



