54 ALFALFA FARMING IN AMERICA. 
in lime and thus unfitted for alfalfa. Yet the soils 
as our fathers found them were sweeter than they 
are today, and thus we often hear old men relate 
that in their boyhood their fathers grew lucerne and 
that their daily task was to cut it and feed it to the 
cows; this on land that will not today unaided grow 
alfalfa at all. 
In reading over the written accounts of how to 
grow lucerne published in the last century one is 
amazed to find how much the authors knew of the 
habits of the plants, and as much astonished to per- 
ceive that few if any of them understood the vital 
connection between alfalfa and a large percentage 
of carbonate of lime in the soil. One of the good old 
books on agriculture is ‘‘The Dictionary of the 
Farm,’’ by the Rev. W. L. Rham, Vicar of Wink- 
field, Berkshire, who died in 1848. The article on 
lucerne is strikingly good, so good, indeed, that had 
the author known two facts of which he seems to 
have been unaware there would have been left little 
to add. He evidently had not traced the relationship 
between thrifty lucerne and a strong lime content in 
the soil, nor had he seen the harm that comes to 
lucerne when it is mown off too early, before it has 
made sufficient growth to start the little shoots at 
the base of the stems. Ignorance of the latter fact 
is very universal in England at the present time and 
leads to much lack of thrift and falling away of the 
alfalfa plants that are usually cut with the scythe 
bit by bit, and fed to horses green, just as Rham 
advised. The writer has indeed pointed out to Eng- 
