Notices of Memoirs — F. J. Bennett — Geology 8f Agriculture. 515 



VIL— Geology and Agriculture. By F. J. Bennett, F.G.S. 



[Abridged from article contributed to the Zand Agents' Record (August 20th, 1904) 

 on the uses to which Ordnance Maps might be put tor Estate Jiecords.] 



MUCH valuable information is lost, both to the landowner and 

 farmer, to say nothing of the geologist, for want of recording 

 it at the time. How often is land drained and no record made 

 of the soil turned out, and the courses of the drains not laid down 

 on the estate maps ? Post-holes and excavations of all kinds are 

 made and no record kept at the time. And yet how easy to put 

 all these down on the map itself, a record for all future time, and 

 constantly under the eye of the owner and occupier. The map 

 itself, the back as well as the front, is most obviously the proper 

 place for these notes. Yet how very few persons use these maps 

 in this way. 



Scotch farmers seem to succeed in England where our farmers 

 cannot, and why is this? One great reason is that they are far 

 more systematic than ours are, and they record the results of each 

 field year by year. 



Let us take the case of a person purchasing an estate. To a large 

 extent he would, in a usual way, be very much in the dark as to 

 the real nature of the property he had purchased. He would, of 

 course, have all the information the seller could afford him, and 

 that would vary very much according to the way in which the estate 

 had been managed. He might be able to obtain 1 in. or even 6 in. 

 maps of the Geological Survey, both Solid and Drift, with, in many 

 cases, the accompanying memoirs ; and, according as he was able 

 to understand them, they would give him much or little information. 

 Yet to most this would be of a superficial or vague nature on many 

 points, and perhaps could not give the details most useful to him. 

 But if he had followed the plan adopted, I believe, in the best 

 estate offices, the 25 in. Ordnance maps would have been used, and 

 on these maps all the divisions of the fields would have been marked 

 at the time the survey was made, and the estate maps would, no 

 doubt, have been brought up to date by marking on them any 

 alteration subsequently made. There would, no doubt, be a schedule 

 of the amount of arable and pasture and woodland, with the kind 

 of trees, water, and roads, and there might be a rough division of 

 the soil into heavy and light. 



Soil. — Now, let us suppose that the late owner had made these 

 maps in the way this paper suggests. Say, that on each field 

 division be noted the nature of the soil and subsoil, whether clay, 

 sand, Ipam, gravel, chalk, etc., and the qualifying character of these. 

 Of course difficulties would arise as to how this information could be 

 obtained. Here, then, I would suggest that a visit should be paid 

 to the Geological Survey Office to ascertain what information was 

 available. As a very useful preliminary to this visit, trial holes, or 

 trenches preferably, could be dug, especially in the pasture lands, so 

 that the subsoil could be exposed. In this way a kind of soil map 

 could be made and recorded on the map or schedule accompanying 



