1883.] 



THE LANCASTER FARMER. 



169 



cleanliness. Improperly keeping pigs has 

 caused more human sickness and destroyed 

 more human life than all the battles the coun- 

 try has ever been engaged in. 



Garden plants should of course be in order, 

 and properly cultivated. 



Many houses, from the mansion to the cot- 

 tage, are unwholesome for some of the follow- 

 ing reasons. 



^ 



MR. WEASEL BROUGHT INTO CAMP, 

 Though a poultry raiser thirty years, upon 

 the sea coast and in villages, we received our 

 tirst call from the blood-thirsty creature about 

 half-past three o'clock, Wednesday, July 25th, 

 1883. Our forty-live Light Brahma chickens 

 were housed in a small out building, to pre- 

 vent depredations in the garden. A terrible 

 squaling among the birds called our attention 

 to the attack innnediately. The chickens 

 turned out at once, and in one corner we 

 found a weasel fastened to the thigh bone of 

 one of the birds, and was beaten with a club 

 before he released his hold. The thigh bone 

 was broken, and the bird had to be killed. 

 Just a week from that date, at the same hour 

 in the afternoon, he came again, but was 

 driven off without damage to the chickens. 

 In the meantime he had visited the neighbors' 

 coops and slain a large number. On the 

 Monday following, at the same hour of the 

 day, we found him among the flock again. 

 Having learned the tenacity of the grip upon 

 his prey, we were prepared for his visit. He 

 had a large chicken by the juglar vein, and 

 was partly concealed under her wing as she lay 

 upon the floor. ■ With a spade we pinned him 

 to the earth and closed his career of blood- 

 sucking. In about two minutes he had drained 

 the blood from a two-pound chicken. The 

 specimen, a male, was about an average adult 

 size ; whole length, from tip to tip, eighteen 

 inches ; body, twelve inches ; tail, six inches. 

 The jaws and neck are exceedingly strong, 

 and the teeth very sharp, nice instruments 

 for tearing open veins. It is very difficult to 

 catch a weasel in a steel-trap, .still more diffi- 

 cult to shoot one. But caught in the act of 

 bloodshed, with a spade, yoi have him. — Bev. 

 Wm. CliJ'l, in American Agriculturist for Oct. 



the other fifty, getting blooded stock and 

 poultry, fertilizers, etc., he can make each 

 acre produce as much as two acres are doing 

 now. His taxes will be less, his cares less, 

 and his gains vastly greater.— ^jnerican Farm 

 and Home. 



SMALL FARMS. 



The United States has many farmers who 

 are "land poor;" they have so much land that 

 they cannat make a living on it. When tlmy 

 have learned that it is not economy to own 

 more land than they can till in the most pro- 

 fitable manner, so that it will pay for the 

 money expended m keeping it free from taxes, 

 weeds, and other encumbrances, they will 

 have solved the problem of ease in a farmer's 

 life. The happiest and thriftiest farmers we 

 have ever known lived on farms of less than 

 one hundred acres — some on farms of only ten 

 acres, every foot of which was made to count. 

 On the other hand, the farmer who has so 

 many broad acres that he cannot walk over 

 them daily, where rods of fence corners are 

 never cultivated or made of any use, lives a 

 life of anxiety and worry. His taxes are 

 heavy and his crojis light. He cannot give 

 reasonably thorough cultivation to so much 

 land. Now, if the farmers who owns one 

 hundred acres of land will sell half of it and 

 expend the money received for it in cultivating 



IS BREED SUPERIOR TO FEED? 

 There must always be a starting-point. A 

 foundation must be laid before we can build. 

 It is surprising how a biological theory like 

 that of evolution, be it right or wrong, gives 

 a bias to a man's mind and tones all his 

 thoughts and opinions. It is seen to crop oul 

 in the now qu'ite prevalent belief that breed is 

 superior to feed in the development of our 

 best races of cattle. It is because of this be- 

 lief or opinion that we see such numerous 

 sums of money paid for immature or even 

 unborn animals— in «<cro— simply because of 

 their parentage. It is not sufficient to note 

 the fact that the hereditary descent of good 

 qualities directly is a very rare circumstance, 

 and that remarkable animals as a rule are the 

 progeny of very ordinary ones, and vice versa. 

 There is no hereditary aristocracy of excel- 

 lence in men or in animals. Great men rarely 

 have sons that are conspicuous for their 

 father's qualities ; on the contrary, the sons of 

 noted men are generally remarkable for the 

 al)sence of any extraordinary capacity, and 

 the continuance of a family reputation is so 

 rare as to be phenomenal. On the other hand, 

 all the great men of history of modern times 

 have emerged from obscurity, and their par- 

 entage has only been remarkable for the acci- 

 dent of producing them. It is the same with 

 animals. There are thousands of instances 

 against a very few exceptions. When the 

 horse Dexter first appeared like ,a sudden 

 meteor no one knew his history, and one was 

 made for him. It was the same with the 

 stallion Smuggler, and we have yet to hear of 

 any of his progeny that have a record. It is 

 the same with cattle. The cow Alphea had 

 no parentage of remarkable record, and al- 

 though some of her blood has been unusually 

 productive, it is not more so than other Jersey 

 cows of other families, or of uo family at all, 

 and some of these have surpassed her record. 

 The cow Duchess, the first of that noted tribe 

 of short horns, produced twenty-four pounds 

 of butter in a week, but late Duchesses have 

 required the help of nurses to rear their 

 calves. Examjiles of this kind are too nu- 

 merous to mention, and all go to show that 

 breed is not to be relied upon to produce any- 

 thing beyond the ordinary character of the 

 breed. Breeds do not improve by breeding. 

 The best animals are made and not bred. Ac- 

 cidental prodigies never reproduce themselves. 

 '• Sports" are known in vegetable growth as 

 extraordinary departures from the normal 

 character of a variety — of a breed. Such, 

 for instance, was the "Late Rose" among 

 potatoes, a sport from the Early Rose, but in 

 a few years it lost all its peculiar chnracter. 

 So with sports among flowers ; they either fail 

 come true to seed, or they produce no seed, 

 and even when propagated by cuttings they 

 deteriorate very quickly. Even a .seedling, a 

 variety bred to a certain point, soon loses its 

 valuable character and becomes poor or worth- 

 less unless it is cultivated with the greatest 

 care. 



Among plants, cultivation alone has been 

 the .source of improvement. Xaturally flow- 

 ers are single. The dog rose is an example ; 

 the original dahlia is another, and there are 

 others in endless numbers. The gardener 

 may breed these plants pure, and all he can 

 do is to keep them stationary. But he begins 

 to use the arts of cultivation — feeding, in fact 

 — and he soon begins to change the natural 

 habits of the plant. From the dog rose he 

 produces the Centipolia, the cabbage rose, the 

 moss rose, and he changes the color from 

 pink to white and deep crimson, with all in- 

 tcriue<liate shades. So he makes the plain- 

 colored siugle-flowered dahlia produce all 

 shiides now known, with its hundreds of 

 petals, quilled in the most regular manner. 

 It is thus with the cabbage and the turnip, 

 the cauliflower and the beets, which, by 

 breed, were seashore plants, of which the sea 

 rocket is a type, or the charlock or wild mus- 

 tard, of our poorer fields. The breed is still 

 the useless charlock : it is the cultivation and 

 the feeding which has produced the valuable 

 cabbage and the indispensable turnip from 

 the original breed. 



Feed is superior to breed. It makes tlie 

 modern improved breed. Feed is a manner 

 of training. By its practice we may take a 

 poor animal and improve it. We continue 

 tills through a few generations and we make 

 a new breed. Hut even then this will not 

 survive by its own force and character. Left 

 alone, it speedily returns to its flrst estate and 

 breeds back — reverts — to its original type. 

 The best variety of turnip abandoned to its 

 own resources goes back to charlock, its origi- 

 nal, in a few years. By poor cultivation its 

 return is slower and more gradual, but not 

 less certain. We take a Ilambletonian and 

 put him before a canal-boat and associate him 

 with wretched mules and scarecrows and treat 

 him as we treat them, and his !)Iood, made 

 rich by generous feeding and care, reverts to 

 the type of the class, and becomes as poor as 

 the meanest scrub of the tow-path. In the 

 same way a careless farmer with more money 

 than wit, misled by the prevalent folly that 

 breed is superior to feed, procures a Duke and 

 Duchess or a Red Ro.se or a Princess, and 

 thinks he will have a herd. He treats these 

 highly fed and well-cared-for cattle as ho 

 treats his scrubs. They retrograde fast, and 

 the calves, pinched and neglected— if they 

 live — become even wor.se than the scrub stock. 

 If this man persists a few years no semblauee 

 of the breed reuiains ; it is all starved out, 

 and only a wreck remains of it. The breed is 

 there. It is the blood which has been lost by 

 want of nourishment, and for want of food the 

 breed is no longer what it was. A wiser man 

 takes the wreck and reverses the method. He 

 feeds and cherishes the spark of life left 

 in tlie blood, and in time restores what has 

 been lost and the breed is recovered again. If 

 feed and care were not superor to breed these 

 pure-bred animals would hold their own 

 in spite of starvation and hardship. If breed 

 is superior to feed there would be no en- 

 couragement for the farmer to improve his 

 stock and to secure a basis for l)ettering it by 

 rearing his young animals and taking the best 

 of them to perpetuate what he thus gains 

 step by step, and interbreeding them to fix his 

 progress as It is made, and so procure ground 



