BRITISH AGRICULTURE. 473 



and the injury to the eyes and general health of the animals. 

 In the other case, a little swamp mud, a few shovelfuls of clay 

 loam, some powdered charcoal, a few pounds of plaster, or a 

 little copperas dissolved in water, -whichever had been most 

 easily obtained in the place, had been daily thrown in; a pro- 

 cess of composting had been attended to simultaneously with 

 the deposition of the manure; the whole had been kept suffi- 

 ciently moist to prevent any violent fermentation; and the 

 consequence was, that the manure in and about these barns was 

 much more valuable than at the others, and the cattle could not 

 fail of doing better. 



Again : I have seen in that country barn yards sloping down 

 to a run of water which by its color I could plainly see was 

 carrying off the soluble salts of the yard. A little variation 

 in the surface of the yard, making the middle the lowest, would 

 have completely prevented the waste. I have seen other yards 

 so arranged that it was clear that immense quantities of manure 

 were there composted, and partially fermented and fitted for 

 the soil, without the waste of a particle. 



It may be said that these are small matters — hardly worth 

 bestowing thought or attention upon. It is not so. The dif- 

 ference of result between the good and bad management of 

 manures on a farm of one hundred acres is all of one hundred 

 dollars a year. Let one farmer of a hundred acres manage 

 well in this respect, and let his neighbor on a similar farm man- 

 age badly in the same respect, and at the end of thirty years, 

 other things being equal, there will be a wide difference be- 

 tween them. The crops of the one will be in the ascending, 

 those of the other in the descending, scale; and while the farm 

 of one will be constantly increasing in value, that of the other 

 will be diminishing, or but hardly holding its own. "Wasteful- 

 ness in the management of the farm fertilizers is one of the 

 greatest obstacles to prosperous farming. Many a farmer has 

 come out badly, who, if he had corrected a fault here thirty 

 years before, would have come out well. 



A scrap of Grecian literature has come down to us, which 

 relates that a wine cask, which had been filled to the brim, was 

 found partially empty. A bystander suggested that an exami- 

 nation be made, to see if there were not a leak at the bottom; 



60* 



