23 AMERICAN HUSBANDRY. 



yield twenty-four bushels of wheat; and the im- 

 provement was not confined to a part, but exti-mlrd 

 to the whole farm, comprising some hundred acres. 

 The reader is referred for a detail of these improve- 

 ments, and an account of the baron's excellent sys- 

 tem of husbandry, to No. 1, vol. ii., of the Cultivator. 

 And it has just been announced to us in a foreign 

 journal, as one of the greatest improvements of the 

 age in rural affairs, that a plough has been invented 

 which breaks and pulverizes the subsoil without 

 turning it to the surface. Its advantages to agricul- 

 ture are thus described by Le Fever in Loudon's 

 Magazine : 



" Smith's subsoil plough seems calculated to ren- 

 der the most steril and unproductive soil fertile and 

 profitable. Mr. Smith's most ingenious invention, 

 by breaking the subsoil without bringing it to the 

 surface, renders it pervious to both air and water. 

 The same chymical changes which take place in a 

 fallow, owing to its exposure to the action of the 

 winds and rain, are thus brought into operation in 

 the subsoil, while the surface soil is in the ordinary 

 course of cropping ; and when, after a few years, by 

 a greater depth of ploughing, the subsoil is mixed 

 with the upper soil, it is found to be so completely 

 changed in its nature as to be capable of producing 

 very kind of corn." 



Jethro-Tull and his disciples maintained that the 

 great secret of inducing fertility consisted in mi- 

 nutely dividing and pulverizing the soil by culture ; 

 and John Taylor, the arator of Virginia, and an ex- 

 cellent practical as well as scientific farmer, consid- 

 ered the atmosphere as the great storehouse of ve- 

 getable food, where this food exists in a gaseous 

 form. The good tillage we advocate embraces all 

 the advantages of Tull's ana* Taylor's theories, with- 

 out lessening the importance which we attach to 

 barn-yard manure. 

 The deep ploughing of dry land, or the breaking 



