FARM IMPROVEMENTS. 67 



expending money enough for drainage, by transporting 

 earth enough, and applying manure enough, a soil, tempo- 

 rarily productive, may be created upon a peat bog, but its 

 productiveness will be due almost wholly to the foreign sub- 

 stances added, and scarcely at all to the underlying peat. 



Peat is found only in basins of greater or less depth, where, 

 during some former period, it accumulated until it reached 

 the level of the lowest depression in the rim of the basin, or 

 its outlet, when further accumulation ceased. In its natural 

 condition it is always saturated with water, and even when its 

 surface is supposed to be thoroughly drained, it seems to 

 exert a sort of capillary action, absorbing water from beneath 

 so readily that ditches at the usual distances, and of the 

 ordinary depth, will not prevent its being, at all times, more 

 or less water-soaked, and in a condition to produce only 

 coarse, seedless grasses, and other semi-aquatic plants which 

 are deficient in most of the elements of nutrition for animals, 

 and which, even after the most successful attempts to create 

 an artificial soil, are sure, within a very brief period, to 

 usurp the place of any of the more valuable forage grasses 

 that may have obtained a precarious hold upon a substance so 

 uncongenial to their growth. 



There is probably no agricultural product, the selling price 

 of which bears so little relation to the actual nutritive value of 

 different parcels, as what is called " English hay." Hay made 

 wholly from grass grown upon rich warm uplands ; grass 

 which, cut when free from dew, will leave upon the scythe a 

 thick deposit of sap in the form of gum ; grass which, when 

 properly cured, will abound in bone, muscle and fat produc- 

 ing properties, and constitute what is known among farmers 

 (most buyers of hay are not farmers) as "hearty " hay ; such 

 hay, to a majority of buyers, is known only as English hay, 

 and will sell for the market price of English hay, and no 

 more. And hay from the coarse grasses and rushes indige- 

 nous to peat meadows, with a sufficient admixture of herds- 

 grass, or some other cultivated grass to give a decent facing 

 to a load when raked off; that which, Avhen handled, will 

 rustle like autumn leaves by the roadside, and of which an 

 animal might eat almost continuously without satiety, — that, 

 too, is known as English hay, and will sell for the market 



