AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 319 



sufficiently forward or not. The young grass is soon eaten oif 

 and the cattle are driven from field to field, destroying but never 

 satisfied, until before midsummer, such farms are more barren and 

 desolate in appearance than they should be in November. Un- 

 filled barns are followed by barn-yards containing little manure, 

 and that is spread over extensive wheat fields as grudgingly as 

 possible; frequently only upon the high grounds, leaving the low 

 land to take care of itself. In this condition thousands of farms 

 are placed by their owners to contend with every variety of 

 season, and every form of insect-life; the soil exhausted and un- 

 able to resist any of the numerous evils to which the best soil 

 and the most approved system of farming will, to a certain extent, 

 be exempt. In Pennsylvania and Ohio for several reasons, 

 among which may be enumerated the high price of seed grain, 

 less wheat was sown last fall than usual. As it respects corn 

 and oats, it is different. The excessive drought last summer 

 destroyed, to a great extent, the grass crop, and many farmers 

 were compelled to plant more corn and oats than usual, in order 

 to procure feed for their cattle. The evil I speak of is not in 

 farming too extensively any one season, for which there may 

 occasionally appear to be some necessity, but it is in overwork- 

 ing the land continually by a system of excessive cropping, 

 which is gradually and most surely exhausting all the productive 

 powers of the soil, and which is the sure forerunner of incalcul- 

 able evils in the increased amount of labor required to produce 

 the same amount of crops, and the enormous high prices for the 

 necessaries of life, which this wretched system of farming has 

 imposed upon the consuming interests of the country. 



GAPES IN CHICKENS. 



Mr. Robinson said, I must bring this subject forward once 

 more. A correspondent at Newburgh, who writes through the 

 newspapers, because his chirography is so much like our jee- 

 about friend in Connecticut tliat he supposes I could not read it 

 except in print, says : There is something ludicrous in the fact of 

 a lawyer writing about the gapes in chickens; but so it is, and he 

 can scarcely keep his face straight while doing so. And so he 

 treats the whole subject of Avorms in the throat as ludicrous. 

 As they cannot get anything to live on there, and tliey prevent 

 the chickens from getting anything to eat, they are wor.-e tlian the 

 "dog in a manger,'' and ought to be expelled by any means short 

 of gunpowder. He gives many good reasons in support of his 



