1850. 



THE GENESEE FARMER. 



61 



I 



tine. Much batter is spoiled from using salt con- 

 taining lime and other substances which liastcn its 

 decomposition. Salt can easily be purified by pour- 

 ing upon it a little warm water and allowing it to 

 drain : it dissolves and takes out the lime and other 

 extraneous substances, and leaves the salt nearly 

 pure. The quantity usually added to butter is one 

 ounce to the pound. After butter has become rancid, 

 it can be restored and made perfectly sweet by a very 

 simple process. This is, to wash it well in cold 

 water, often changed, and after pressing out the 

 water, s^.h it anew and add a little sugar, say half an 

 ounce to the pound. This will be found to render it 

 innrh more palatable, although it may not entirely 

 restore thai delicate flavor peculiar to new and sweet 

 butter, vi'hich once lost can never be restored. 



The above hints on making and preserving butter, 

 I have translated from a French Agricultural Journal, 

 with such additions and alterations as make tliem 

 applicable on this siile the Atlantic. W. P. F, — 

 ff'ashingtoTi, Jun'y, 1850. 



NOTES FOR THE MONTH. 



A Milch Cow. — A correspondent in a late New 

 York Journal of Commerce, under the signature of 

 " Traveller," says that " on the farm of John John- 

 son of Fayette, near Seneca lake, a cow gave forty- 

 two quarts of milk per day through the month of 

 June, 1848 ; and for five days she gave forty-five 

 quarts per day." It is a pity that a paper which so 

 ably advocates our great agricultural and commer- 

 cial interests, should thus condescend to lend a hand 

 to hoax our farmers with such a milk story as this. 



A gentleman of this place, Josf.ph Wright, who 

 is justly distinguished for his great practical success 

 in developing the resources of nature, in both her 

 vegetable and animal kingdoms, went to the farm of 

 Mr. Johnson one day in the same leafy month of 

 June, 1848. where he saw the said cow, and learned 

 from Mr. J. that she gave a pailful of milk three 

 times a day. The pail now became an object of 

 curiosity to our practical friend, which, when pro- 

 duced, proved to be a ten quart tin pail with a strainer 

 of the ordinary kind ! Mr. W. has since compassed 

 the land cast and west, to procure a cow that will 

 give forty quarts of milk per day, without success. 

 He now authorizes us to say that he will give $.500 

 for any cow that will give forty quarts of milk per 

 day for any three consecutive days in the year. 



John Johnson of Fayette, stands in the front rank 

 of Seneca's masterly farmers. As the "Traveller" 

 says, he has "miles of under-drained fields," whose 

 surface and sub-soil seems to have undergone an 

 amelioration almost magical, — a successful experi- 

 ment, which many of his astute neighbors are pre- 

 paring to imitate. Such a man needs not the aid of 

 fiction to gild his truly substantial respectability. 

 If he told a "Traveller" a fish story, our word for it, 

 it was only from that irresistable impulse to sportive 

 humor a trace of which we trust may be found in the 

 organic elements of his Scotch character. 



Rural Literarv Progrf.ss. — If we may judge 

 from the tenor of the correspondence of Batbham's 

 Ohio Cultivator, the rural population of that State 

 are much mure alive to the necessity of their own 

 literary improvement, and to their progress in agri- 

 cultural science, than are the same class in the 

 Empire Slate. At the west, at least in Ohio, there 

 seems to be a growing desire for progress, to which 



is added a sort of fear akin to jealousy, that rural 

 New V'ork has more State patronage, more school- 

 masters in the field, and is going ahead of ihcin in 

 literature and science ; while on the other hand t.'io 

 great mass of our farmers, good easy souls as they 

 are, seem to lay the unction to their souls that Lciiig 

 sovereigns of the Empire State, they ha\e by birth- 

 right all the knowledge and all the honor nc-cestary 

 to their calling and position in life. 



A farmer, writing to the Ohio Cultivator, .>;pca!-.a 

 feelingly of the wretched common school system 

 tolerated in that State. He adverts to the mode of 

 hiring teachers as though the "price and not the 

 qualifications" of the itinerant biped who claims the 

 name and office of schoolmaster, was the great desid- 

 eratum there. 



A farmer's daughter, feeling a desire for more school 

 learning than her district school can give her, apprais 

 to the editor of the Cultivator for his opinion of the 

 propriety of a farmer's daughter going to a select 

 school, about which she has some misgivings, as two 

 girls who had Jinished their education at a semitiary, 

 " came home, as every body said, 'too proud to work 

 and too poor to live without it!'" So far from 

 "finishing their education," it is most probable 'hat 

 the principal of that seminary would say that ttieir 

 studies had come to a sad ending. I once heard a 

 master in Israel complain of the low state of talent 

 generally in the priest's office. He said, if a man 

 has a precocious son, he puts him into a law oiiico 

 or some other profession or trade vvhci-e his gaBius 

 may have scope ; but if he has one son duller ih^n 

 the rest, the absence of genius or passion in him is 

 prima facie evidence to the father that the ton is 

 pious, and he is fitted for the ministrv as a matter of 

 course. Had the parents of these two gir!s sent them 

 apprentice to a millincror a mantua-maker, they wo:ilJ 

 have hit their vocation much better than in placing 

 them at a select school. Who believes that a liberal 

 schocl education unfits the mind to enjoy the plain 

 domestic labors and comforts of the farm ? So far 

 from it, it opens to the mind the true avenues to the 

 study and practice and just appreciation of the useful 

 and ornamental, the beautiful and true, in intellectual, 

 practical, and social }ife. It enables us to value the 

 gloss and tinsel of the world at just what it is wonh 

 — to avoid mistaking the extrinsic for the intrin.sic, 

 pretence for merit, fee, k,c. 



Indian 'Corn. — Over fifty thousand bushel.^ of 

 Indian corn has been taken in by one firm in this 

 village, within the last three inonths, at 50 rts. per 

 bushel. Thirty years ago but little corn was grown 

 in this county : wheat was then the gre^t paying 

 crop — the grand arcanum of the farmer In that 

 day, corn was so much neglected that many fields of 

 primitive fertility might be seen at harvest with more 

 bulk of weeds than corn stalks — the cereal crop not 

 averaging twenty bushels to the acre, iiut, as the 

 French say, all that is changed now. Wheat is no 

 longer a certain crop on the same soil, now exhausted 

 of its phosphates, and of late a prey to the fly, the 

 worm, and the rust. Indian corn being a grosser 

 feeding cereal, requires only the strong nitrogenous 

 manure of tiie barn-yard, the hog-pen, or old sward, 

 with good, early, and frequent tillage, to insure a 

 large crop almost any season in our climate. Hence, 

 at this time corn is fast becoming the lavorite crop 

 of our farmers. An extended foreign market (thanks 

 to free trade) has contributed greatly to the value of 

 this crop ; and this foreign demand must increase, as 



