352 Transactions of the American Institute. 



perly handled, needs no further coudeusatiou than that which a 

 hot sun will give it, as I now attempt to show. Mr. John Coburn, 

 of Dracut, Mass., has a peat bog of seven acres, three miles from 

 the city of Lowell. It was cleared long ago, and a deep, wide 

 ditch put through the center, through which a lively stream of 

 pm'e water, and of considerable volume, runs. The bog, in places, 

 is twenty feet deep; it is pastured, and yields considerable feed; 

 and the peat is so dense and firm, that horses, di'awing loads, walk 

 over it without danger or difficulty. It is almost perfectly black, 

 .is free from undecomposed fiber, and cuts out with the slane like 

 plugs of tobacco. This year he has cut and cured several hundred 

 tons, most of which he has sold in the city for five dollars a ton. 

 Mr. Coburn used no machine, except a big Irishman with a slane, 

 who cut it into shapely cakes or plugs, say fifteen inches long and 

 thi'ee by four square, and laid them carefully on the sod beside the 

 ditch. A boy loaded them with a four-tined fork upon a one-horse 

 dray, and hauled them a few rods oflT, upon the clean sward, and 

 spread them. Two or three days of hot sunshine made them ready 

 to turn over; in three or four days the peat was fit to house in a 

 loose shed with a roof that would turn water. I saw, some weeks 

 since, a heap of a hundred or more tons of his peat in such a shed 

 near his bog, ready for market, and I considered it superior in 

 respect to size of lump, density, and coherence, to a similar pile I 

 saw last spring at the manufactory of a large peat company — the 

 company's peat being "condensed" by an extensively advertised 

 machine. Major Durkee, also of Dracut, exhibited at the Middle- 

 sex (Mass.) county agricultural fair, specimens of a quantity of 

 peat, dug from his own bog this year, and it was generally con- 

 ceded to be better than that beside it, made by costly machinery. 

 One man will cut out in a day enough raw peat to make five tons 

 ready to burn. If owners of bogs will clear the surface, and thor- 

 oughly drain, so as to kill the ferns and coarse grasses, they can 

 beat the best machine in the world making peat fuel, and money 

 out of it. These facts should save many from bu}dng expensive 

 peat machinery. 



SOUTH JERSEY. 



Mr. George Morden, Oakland, Mich., addressed a letter t« the 

 Club, making inquiries about the price of labor and land in South 

 Jersey. 



Mr. S. B. Nichols, Hammonton, N. J., spoke of South Jersey, 

 and said that they do not claim that they can grow crops there 



