164 



THE LANCASTER FARMER. 



[November, 



Fowls naturally 'require a little stimulating 

 food in cold weather. A judicious system of 

 feeding stimulants is not to excite undue ac- 

 tion in the system, but 'merely to tone it up 

 when it is about to flag. 



It has been proved by experiments that if 

 young turkeys be fed on soft food mixed with 

 milk, instead of water, much superior and 

 move tender meat will be produced. 



Professor J. F. W, Johnston, says : "It 

 is certain that common salt has in very many 

 cases been advantageous to the growing 

 crops." He then quotes the result of experi- 

 ments in which wheat dressed with salt gave an 

 average of eight bushels more than the same 

 kind of soil produces without salt ; barley 

 gives an increase, of twenty-one ^bushels to 

 the acre. 



Neablt as many reams of paper in the 

 United States, are made into collars as are 

 used to write upon. 



Never allow a mudhole to remain about a 

 well. If your water is muddy and impure 

 throw in a peck of lime to purify it. If ani- 

 malculsD appear in the water throw in a half 

 gallon of salt to make them settle to the 

 bottom. 



Musk sheep, found in the Artie regions, 

 are said to have a whine somewhat like the 

 snorting of a walrus, entirely unlike the bleat- 

 ing of a sheep. 



The sense of touch in eyeless fishes is shown 

 bv experimenting to be extraordinarily devel- 

 oped. 



In selecting your seed-wheat, or seed for a 

 rye crop, weigh a pint from the bin or sack, 

 and purchase that which weighs the heavier. 



"Waldo" sends the following novel ex- 

 periment to the Practical larmer: I cut a 

 barrel of blue grass sod and with a spade 

 chopped it into pieces about two inches 

 square. I took these in a basket and drop- 

 ped them -where we had sown oats, putting 

 them about two feet apart and stepping on 

 each piece. I find they are all growing, and I 

 shall watch closely to see how long it will be 

 in spreading to cover the ground. If this 

 plan was caiTied out on a large scale I think 

 tlie chopped sods could be scattered with a 

 shovel or forked from the wagon and a roller 

 passed over it, and if this was done early in 

 the spring it would all gi'ow. 



It is sai-d that one of the best remedies for 

 the cabbage worm is to sprinkle air-slaked 

 lime on the plant in the morning on the dew 

 till the plants are white with it. One who 

 has tried it for several years says that at most 

 two applications are sufficient. 



It should be remembered that it is easier to 

 deteriorate a crop by choosing bad seed, or 

 even by carelessly neglecting the selection of 

 good seed, than it is to improve upon a varie- 

 ty already acknowledged to be good. The 

 down hill road is the easiest traveled. 



Abernetiit used to say that "of the large 

 quantity of food a man swallows, one-fourth 

 supports him, and the rest he keeps at his 

 risk." 



A New York farmer, who is also a practi- 

 cal slieep grower, gives the following as a sure 

 cure for grub in sheep: Turn into each nos- 

 tril of the animal aifected half a teaspoonf ul 

 of kerosene oil. 

 Paper belting is now. being used in Japan, 



and is said to have been found stronger than 

 leather belting. 



English farmers have been very successful 

 in growing wheat by the aid of peat charcoal 

 as a fertilizer, using at the rate of 500 pounds 

 to the acre. 



Sir John Lubbock estimated that 2,000,- 

 000 animal species have existed on our globe, 

 of which only about 25,000 are as yet on re- 

 cord. He places the number of recent spe- 

 cies at 700,000. 



One need not be much of an epicure to be 

 able to distinguish readily the diflerence be- 

 tween a fowl that has been shut up and deli- 

 cately fed for a time before killings and that 

 which has been forced to scratch for a living. 

 Confine fowls intended for the table in a dark- 

 ened place, give them plenty of milk, either 

 fresh, thick, or sour, with grain and table 

 scraps, and you will have a delicate article of 

 food, with no strong "chicken" flavor about 

 it. 



Transfusing blood from a living animal 

 to an unhealthy one has been practiced for 

 three hundred years. 



The famous system of rotation, now ex- 

 tended quite generally throughout England 

 and Scotland, with occasional modification, 

 is as follows : The first year, clover and mix- 

 ed grass seed; the second year wheat; the 

 third year, turnips or rutabagas; the four 

 year, barley, and then the same course again. 

 An innovation on this is to add another grain 

 crop, oats, to the shift, making a five years' 

 course; and so efficient has this course been 

 that it has been calculated that the grain 

 crops have increased one-fourth. 



Fanny, an ancient carp in the pond at 

 Fontainebleau, has just died. She is said to 

 have been hatched in the time of Francis 

 I., and had become gray. 



Soot, dried blood and woolen refuse are all 

 purely nitroger ous manures.' Soot owes its 

 value to the presence of a small and variable 

 quantity of ammonium salts. Dried blood is 

 an excellent manure, containing from ten to 

 thirteen per cent, of nitrogen. Shoddy and 

 other forms of wool and hair are variable in 

 composition, owing to admixture of dirt, 

 grease and other foreign matter. The nitro- 

 gen they contain will range from five to ten 

 per cent. 



In several years the sickness of pneumonia 

 has increased slightly in September, decreas- 

 ed in October and increased again with the 

 Indian summer. 



The bot, the inhabitant of the stomach of 

 the horse, is produced from the eggs of the 

 gad-fly, which are deposited in the hair of the 

 horse; from these eggs are hatched a little 

 grub which is licked off by the horse and 

 swallowed. Sometimes several hundreds are 

 thus deposited in the stomach. Formerly 

 they were considered very injurious, but now 

 it is conceded that they cannot do as much 

 injury as the nostrums used for destroying 

 them. 



The American Dairyman, says that wild 

 peppermint scattered around in corn cribs, 

 etc., will keep the rats away. 



In keeping poultry for the sake of the eggs 

 they lay, a correspondent writes that no 

 hens should be kept over after their second 

 laying season. Hens, as a rule, lay about an 



equal number of eggs in their'first and second 

 seasons, after which the produce rapidly de- 

 creases. 



Fob small hen-houses the roosts are gene- 

 rally too high. Fowls cannot use their wings 

 to advantage in such confined places. 



The melon has been cultivated from time 

 immemorial, and yet there is no other plant 

 known that is so wonderfully variable in its 

 character. In the same hill and; from the 

 same seed there will be produced some of the 

 finest, as well as some of the poorest, speci 

 mens. 



The corn crop of the' United States aver-j 

 ages nearly 1,500,000,000 .bushels, or 47,000, 

 000 tons, enough to load 5,000,000 rail cars, 

 making 30,000 trains 'each half a mile, long, 

 requiring at least 60,000 locomotives to draw 

 them. 



It is thirty per cent, more profitable to 

 pre-mature aud dispose of fattening cattle at 

 two years old than to keep them up to three 

 years. 



Some way or other, mules for work on the 

 farm are not appreciated by the agricultural 

 community. "Why it is no one can tell. It 

 does not cost but little over half as much to 

 feed grain to mules, as it does horses, as they 

 require so much less and remain in good order, 

 and as far as work is concerned a span of 

 njules will do as much and probably more 

 work than a span of horses can. They are as 

 gentle and as easily handled as horses. It is 

 true they are not as handsome, and a few 

 years ago they were not as gentle, but the 

 American mule is a great improvement in 

 every particular on his Spanish brother. They 

 are found to be so profitable by the farmers in 

 the South that it is seldom a span of horses 

 can be found on a farm, but-all the teams are 

 composed of mules. There should be more of 

 them in the North. 



I 



Selections. 



ADDRESS'OF WM. SAUNDERS. 



To the members of the Entomological Society of 

 Ontario. 



Gentlemen: "While Entomology may be 

 said to deal with small things, the abundance 

 or scarcity of the tiny creatures called insects 

 involves great issues. The truth of this state- 

 ment has been illustrated forcibly in several 

 directions this year, notably ifi the case of the 

 Angoumois wheat moth which has played sad 

 havoc among the stores of corn and wheat in 

 granaries in the Southwestern States. It is 

 said to have destroyed many thousand bush- 

 els of grain and so widespread has the evil be- 

 come that it is the opinion of the New York 

 Sun that if the Government or the farmers of 

 America could at this time arrest the pro- 

 gress of this insect by expending five millions 

 of dollars it would be the best investment 

 ever made by the people. 



The Angoumois grain moth, Butalis cerealella 

 Oliv. is a small moth, the larva of which is 

 every destructive to all sorts of grain. Tlie 

 female lays her eggs on the grain sometimes 

 in the field before it is fully ripened, but more 

 frequently in the bins of the granary. The 

 eggs are of a bright, orange, red color, and in 

 a few days there issue from them very mi- 

 nute whitish colored worms, scarcely thicker 



