MACHINERY OF THE CLAYS. 223 



per ' alternating with the conditions of wet and dry 

 have been too much perverted to the result of making 

 the agriculturist a Jack-of-all-trades. He goes out of 

 a light-soil farm into a clay, or vice versd, and plunges 

 his share into the new element with about as much 

 unconcern as his wife puts her duck eggs under a hen 

 to be hatched and educated. Plump goes the little 

 brood of changelings into the first pool of water, in- 

 continently bent on their baptism of native mud, to 

 the consternation of the astounded mother, who vainly 

 plies her claw in scratching on the sandy shore for 

 unsuited food, croaking out her frantic warnings to 

 the contumacious family of webfoot. With about as 

 intelligent a philosophy as she exhibits under such 

 distressful and hopeless circumstance, has many a 

 plough been stuck into the clays. But nothing can 

 express the truth in shorter phrase than that of old 

 Dobson. 



" I tell you, Sir, it's a different trade!" 

 No wonder then that " the best form of the Plough 

 is still matter of disagreement." It must ever be so, 

 as long as Clay and Sand are things as opposed in 

 nature to each other as positive and negative. A stiff 

 clay under a moist climate the greater its mechanical 

 disadvantage, and its intrinsic chemical superiority, 



