MARCH.] PARING AXD BURNING. 177 



a light, that nothing more is necessary than to re- 

 cite them very shortly. Mr. Wilkes, of Measham, 

 in Derbyshire, lias for many years been in the 

 pra&icc of ploughing old rough pastures (the soil 

 a stiffish loam), eight or nine inches deep, and 

 burning the whole furrow in heaps of thirty or 

 forty bushels each, the fires lighted by a few coals, 

 and coal sla$h ; the effect was very great, and the 

 improvement immense and durable. Mr. Wilkes 

 is of opinion, from the experience of many years, 

 that even this burning, which is twenty times the 

 depth of common paring, does not waste the soil 

 in the least, but does no more than break the tex- 

 ture of stiff soils, expelling a great quantity of wa- 

 ter ; that by exposition to the atmosphere, the land 

 re-absorbs its water, and by the great immediate 

 fertility, fills itself presently with more vegetable 

 particles than it had before. Thirty years ago, his 

 father burnt, at Oversea!, exaclly in the manner de- 

 scribed, a field of ten acres, which was not then, and 

 has not since been treated with any more favour 

 than the fields adjoining, yet it has ever since re- 

 tained a superiority. 



The writer of this Calendar, in 1790 hollow- 

 drained an old grass-field of four acres and a half, 

 of cold, wet, poor loam, on a clay marie bottom ; 

 the rent Os. an acre, and not worth more in its 

 then state, perhaps, than 7s. In 17Q1 he plough- 

 ed four acres of it four inches deep, which was the 

 whole depth of the soil, or surface, of different co- 

 lour from the stratum beneath, between that sur- 



N face 



