S£-0 



I HAVE on my shelves an old book — worm-eaten and time-worn — which 

 professes to teach every art connected with the domestic animals of a hun- 

 dred years ago, from horses and cattle to goats and fighting-cocks, including 

 their diseases, their habits, and their uses, together with every art belonging 

 to the complete education of a sporting man of the last century j — all writ- 

 ten " By a Country Gentleman from his own experience" 



I cannot claim such sublime originality for my present work ; for while 

 none of the operations of the farm are unfamiliar to me, and while I pro- 

 fess to be, by education and experience, a practical farmer, I have tried to 

 t-ellin its pages not only what I have learned over my work, — which, in the 

 case of any individual, is woefully little, — but also what I have gained from 

 the recorded experience of other farmers, who have been accumulating, 

 little by little for 2,000 years and more, the precious sap of wisdom with 

 which our tree of knowledge is fed. 



I have endeavored, too, to look beyond the farmer who has done so 

 much for the unfolding of the riches that Nature, our universal mother, 

 showers upon her industrious sons, and to question, as well, those devoted 

 friends of the farmer, the chemist and the student, who ask from Nature 

 something more than her material gifts, who seek the very cunning of her 

 deft handicraft, who — not satisfied with the fact that she rolls up her bounty 

 from seed-time until harvest — ask how her work is done ; how the seed 

 sprouts, the leaf shoots, the blossom unfolds, the fruit ripens ; how re- 

 newed life and vigor spring from death and decay ; how fields are exhausted, 

 and how made fertile ; how crops are increased, and kine are grown ; how 

 from only arir and earth and water such a marvel as man is made to live 

 and move. 



