MAY.] PARE AND BURN. 2Q1 



pare and burn under any pretence whatever. The 

 ued for this conduct, is an apprehension 

 that the depth of the soil decreases from it : that 

 you bun .id, and reduce half an inch to half 



a line ; a great evil, when the land is perhaps only 

 three or four inches deep on a lime-stone rock. 

 But this reasoning, many very sensible and expe- 

 rienced farmers know to be false. They, on the 

 contrary, urge the universal circumstance of no 

 land ever being pared till it has acquired a turf, 

 which, with natural grasses, will be from 12 to 2O 

 years ; and, with sainfoin, the duration of the 

 crop, which is from 1O to 20 years : that it is not 

 the soil which is burnt, but the bulbs of the plants, 

 the roots, and net-work of grass roots : the earth, 

 which is intermixed, is not burnt ; it is calcined, but 

 not reduced to ashes, all of which arise from bulbs and 

 roots : hence the fact, that the staple of the soil rarely 

 suffers from paring and burning. If this reasoning be 

 not true, whence the known fact, that soils not four 

 inches thick, and which have remained at the same 

 thickness as long as the oldest man can remember, 

 have yet been pared and burnt regularly four or five 

 times in a century ; and, as the same husbandry is 

 known by record to have been practised for ages 

 on the same land, the staple must have lost three 

 inches every hundred years ; in other words, it 

 must have been totally gone long ago, and nothing 

 but rock remained : all which is evidently false, 

 the soil at this day being as thick as ever. We 

 may hence conclude, what such farmers assert to 



u 2 be 



