340 



NEW ENGLAND FARMER. 



July 



For the New England Farmer, 

 BETBOSPECTIVE NOTES. 



"The Best Gate." — In the weekly issue of 

 this journal for May 10th, and in the monthly for 

 June, will be found an article with the above head- 

 ing, which contains information as to the construc- 

 tion of farm gates, which may be valuable to not 

 a few. There must be in every town of every 

 State, with the customs of which we have any ac- 

 quaintance, a good many farmers who are tired of 

 the trouble, loss of time, and other inconveniences 

 which are the necessary accompaniments of the 

 use of bars in the place of gates, and who would 

 readily substitute the latter for the former, if only 

 they were made acquainted Avith a method of 

 making a gate without employing a mechanic, or 

 without paying as much for it as mechanics gen- 

 erally would charge. Now this article under no- 

 tice supplies just the information which such farm- 

 ers, and all, indeed, who lose a great amount of 

 time and patience every year with bars, are great- 

 ly in need of. It tells them how to make a gate 

 which shall be cheap, lasting, effectual as a barri- 

 er, light, and not likely to sag or get out of order. 

 This gate, too, beside all the above advantages, 

 possesses the still greater recommendation of be- 

 ing so simple and easy of construction, that it 

 may be made by every one who owns, and who 

 can use, the most common tools. "Any one can 

 build such a gate and hang it — the posts being set 

 — in two hours." 



Let all, then, who need a gate, or gates, read 

 and inwardly digest this article. To hundreds it 

 would be worth, in comfort, convenience, saving 

 of time, &c., quite a little pile. 



We have, for years, had a similar gate under 

 observation, and from that, and our own "idea," 

 we should build any ^ate hereafter needed a little 

 different from that described. We should have 

 an upright stiffener in the middle, and a facing to 

 the board at the latch end, between which the 

 latch should play. We would use no oak or oth- 

 er hard wood, but only pine, or other light wood. 



"Manures." — On page 2uG of the June num- 

 ber of the Farmer may be found a brief para- 

 graph from the pen of S. P. ]\I.. a Maine farmer, 

 in which he gives a very sensible opinion in re- 

 gard to home-made composts and commercial ma- 

 nures, which, if only heeded and acted upon by 

 farmers generally, would be greatly to their ad- 

 vantage. This brief, but pithy paragraph, — a 

 good specimen of the muUam in parvo, — was 

 called forth by the late inquiry of a correspond- 

 ent — "Will Concentrated INIanures Pay?" — and 

 gives the inquirer, and all others, to understand 

 that there is something which will pay far better. 

 What this something is, and how it may be pro- 

 cured or manufactured, and how well it acts on 

 the farm of S. P. M., he has told the readers of 

 this journal in so small a compass, and with a wis- 

 dom as condensed as that of the proverbs of some 

 proverbial philosophers, as to make it a vain at- 

 tempt to condense his wise answer any farther. 

 Let the reader refer to and read the two sentences 

 in which the answer to the above question is so 

 wisely and warily given, and then let him go to 

 work and save every particle of everything that 

 will fertilize or enrich his land, composting the 

 various materials in the most approved manner, 

 and his crops of grass, grain, roots, fruit, and all 



else, will be more luxuriant than if he had ex- 

 pended fifty dollars for a ton of a much puffed 

 article, the real value of which has been proved 

 by those excellent friends of the farmer. Profs. 

 S. W. Johnson and E. Pugh, to be hardly one- 

 third of the j)rice at which it is sold. 



The farmers of New England, as well as others, 

 are under obligations to l)r. Pugh, for his recent 

 exposure of the frauds which have been practiced 

 u\)on them by the sale of such worthless trash as 

 Prof. Johnson had previously shown the article 

 under notice to be. That the obligations of farm- 

 ers to these two gentlemen are as great as has 

 been just stated, will appear quite evident, we 

 think, from the following quotation from an arti- 

 cle by Dr. Pugh, which has been extensively cop- 

 ied into or noticed by our best agricultural jour- 

 nals. He says, after stating that the article re- 

 ferred to (advertised as a superphosphate) con- 

 tained but little valuable material, and a great 

 deal of worthless matter, which would very mate- 

 rially increase its cost to the flirrner, by increasing 

 the cost of transportation, — "The manufacture 

 and sale of such a manure, at such a price, im- 

 plies either gross ignorance or dishonesty, and 

 points out the necessity of our having some means 

 of protecting the farmer from the shameful impo- 

 sition that sales of such manures inflict. The 

 sale of every 100 tons of such a manure annually 

 would imply a loss of at least $3oOO per year to 

 the farmers, to say nothing of the still greater loss 

 of crops, resulting from the use of such a worth- 

 less manure. Just such worthless manures as this 

 flooded the English market a few years ago, but 

 they have been driven out by the agricultural 

 chemists of that country. Nothing would be 

 easier than to drive them out of the American 

 market, if farmers would insist that manufacturers 

 should sell manures at prices regulated by analy- 

 sis, and if there were suitable penalties attached 

 to the fraud of not giving as good an article as the 

 analysis called for. . . . The farmer might more 

 efiectually be protect'id from the frauds and igno- 

 rance of manure-venders by the employment of 

 State chemists in each State, whose duty it should 

 be not only to watch the manure market, but to 

 make themselves acquainted with all the manurial 

 resources of the State." The expense of employ- 

 ing a State chemist, and supplying him with the 

 auxiliaries for experimental, agricultural and sci- 

 entific researches, would, acccording to Dr. Pugh, 

 be only a fraction of what would be saved to the 

 farmers by the protection thus afl'orded them 

 against worthless manures and wicked imposters. 



More Anon. 



Among the other curious instruments, exhibited 

 in the Philosophical Instrument Department in 

 the London Great Exhibition, is a machine for 

 microscopic writing. With this machine it is stat- 

 ed that the words "Matthew Marshall, Bank of 

 England," can be written in the two and a half 

 millionth of an inch in length ; and it is actually 

 said that calculations made on this data show, that 

 the whole Bible can be written twenty-two times 

 in the space of a square inch. The words to be 

 written microscopically are written in pencil, in 

 ordinary characters, on a sheet of paper at the 

 bottom of the instrument. But the pencil with 

 which this is done, communicates by a series of 



