THE FARM OF THE FIRST MINISTER. 9 



to some a monotonous business, but every good plowman will 

 tell you that it is not so. Each furrow makes a little history of 

 its own, of much interest to him who turns it. If his plow 

 shows a fixed disposition to run away, he notes the fact, and, 

 if it be a good one, at once changes its draft line. If a poor 

 one, embodying faulty lines of construction, he dismisses it 

 with his blessing, as Abraham did Hagar, and seeks a better 

 one. No farmer can afford to use a poor plow. 



The practical plowman soon learns that the basal idea in 

 every plow is a combination of two wedges, one to move hor- 

 izontally, and the other perpendicularly ; the office of the first 

 being to sever the furrow slice from the subsoil ; while that of 

 the second is to raise and turn it downside up. He also sees 

 that if these wedges are too blunt, and their cutting edges are 

 kept dull, unnecessary resistance will be encountered and the 

 amount of power required to draw the plow through the soil 

 will be unduly increased. 



A careful experiment made, some years since, with two pop- 

 ular plows in breaking up a piece of tough sod-land, revealed 

 the fact that the turning of a furrow eight and a half inches 

 deep and fourteen inches wide, by one of them, required an 

 expenditure of power amounting to eleven hundred and fifty 

 pounds ; while by the use of the other, the same work was 

 done at an expenditure of only eight hundred. As the cost of 

 plowing is largely in that of the power used, the comparative 

 merits of the two plows were very apparent. 



When, in the course of time, experience had taught the 

 present proprietor many of the points in good plowing, the 

 question arose in his mind, why do you and your men and 

 teams walk hundreds of miles every year to plow? Readily 

 came the answer, " to pulverize the soil." To the next ques- 

 tion, " Does the old ' Lion plow,' which simply lifts the furrow 

 from its bed, and after turning it lays it down again as solid as 

 before, do that?" To this inquiry the answer was simply 

 "No." 



Thereupon the old ■" Lion " was left to " innocuous desue- 

 tude " and a successor was employed which turned every fur- 

 row slice with a twist, and rested its off edge upon the near 

 edge of its neighbor. Thus turned, partial pulverization was 



