THEORY AND PRACTICE. 73 



perish : and herein lies the chief and wise application 

 of all carbonaceous or bulky manure. Rightly, then, 

 so far as their knowledge went, did our forefathers, 

 who knew nothing of Turnip culture, plough-in their 

 long manure before winter : a poor practice at best, 

 we say, to put manure in immediate contact with a 

 grain crop, but not more poor than to apply to a 

 green spring-crop under the burning sun of June the 

 treasures of the Farm-yard whose spirit is exhaled 

 before the body is buried, and whose body is not 

 rotted time enough to afford its remnant of inorganic 

 food to the crop it is applied to. 



Who can wonder, then, that the ' artificials ' should 

 sometimes beat the long manure, for Spring applica- 

 tion? And who can doubt that we wise moderns 

 have left half our lesson unlearnt, in having changed 

 the time of manuring without changing also the condi- 

 tion of the manure ? 



An experiment, whose object was to test the 

 comparative merits of the Ancient and the Modern 

 Fallow, seemed to some people almost unmeaning. 

 The superiority of a green crop over no crop at all, 

 providing that the land is dry enough in the winter 

 for eating or carting it off when grown, was one of 

 those public propositions that people had run away 



