298 MAY. 



with profit. In a word, this husbandry deserves the 

 warmest praise. 



But of late years, an opinion against it ha* pre- 

 vailed much in some counties. Several of the no- 

 bility and gentry, of very large estates, have inter- 

 dicted the practice, not allowing their tenants to 

 pare and burn under any pretence whatever. The 

 reason assigned for this conduct, is an apprehension 

 that the depth of the soil decreases from it : that 

 you burn the land, 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 limestone 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 7 to 2O 

 years ; and, with sainfoin, the duration of the 

 crop, which is from 1O to 1O 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 



