330 Transactions of the American Institute. 



sheet-iron cylinder, provided with dampers, -which may be opened 

 or closed at pleasure. The object of the device is to retain and 

 save the waste heat from a stove. After a critical examination, the 

 cylinder was highly approved as an excellent device for the pur- 

 poses for which it is designed. 



AGRICULTURE IN SALEM COUNTY, N. J. 



The committee appointed by this Club some time ago, to visit 

 the county of Salem, N. J., report that the invitation was extended 

 by practical farmers who read the report of our proceedings, and 

 who wished to confer with us in our efforts to advance the great 

 art of agriculture. The county of Salem is between the latitudes 

 of thirty-nine and forty, and bordered on the west by the Delaware 

 river. The old town of Salem is the county seat, about forty miles 

 south of Philadelphia, with which there is daily communication, 

 both by steamboat and railroad. This part of New Jersey was 

 first settled by a few Swedes, more than two hundred years ago, 

 but they soon gave way to a community of Friends or Quakers, 

 under the leadership of John Fenwick, in 1675. The descendants 

 of these Friends are still in possession of most of the lands origin- 

 ally taken up by their ancestors. We were shown farms of which 

 a transfer deed had never been made, the property passing to the 

 natural heirs for a succession of generations for nearly two hundred 

 years. Some families had died out, and rum and the sheriff, acting 

 in concert, as they too often do, had changed the descent of a few, 

 so that the people we visited are not all Quakers, but to the Friends 

 chiefly belong the merit of the superb agriculture that we had the 

 pleasure of seeing during this most interesting visit. The country 

 is gently rolling, neither dead levels nor steep hills. The soil is 

 light, but not sandy. We saw neither rocks nor stones. Like 

 other portions of South Jersey, and especially the great counties 

 of Monmouth and Burlington, this county was at one time so 

 impoverished by the old system of farming, that many people sold 

 out and emigrated to the new lands of the West. We were shown 

 fields now producing seventy and eighty bushels of shelled corn 

 to the acre, that fifty years ago were lying in common, and were 

 the resort of the people for blackberries. A rotation of crops, the 

 use of clover; and marl and lime as fertilizers, together with the 

 crops of hay from the redeemed marshes, have changed all this, 

 and it would now be impossible to imagine there had ever been a 

 time when people had left Salem because it waa so poor. 



