436 Chronicles of Science. | July, 



one of the most efficient and cheapest purchased foods we have. Its 

 effect on dairy cattle in the production of milk is especially note- 

 worthy. 



Among the other topics which have been brought under the 

 notice of agriculturists during the past few months by our agri- 

 cultural societies are Flax-culture, Grass-land Management, Irri- 

 gation and the Water Supply, and Agricultural Education. 



Flax-culture has received a large extension of late years both in 

 this country and in Ireland, owing to the increased value of the fibre, 

 which has been due to the diminished cotton supply. Mr. Beale Browne 

 made it the subject of a recent lecture before the English Agricul- 

 tural Society, in which he declared that it had lately proved more 

 profitable than the wheat-crop, which it followed, even upon the poor 

 thin Cotswold soils, where he had grown it. And in Ireland, where 

 two successive crops may be had of the crop on freshly broken-up 

 moory soil, which will grow nothing else until it has been limed, it 

 is still more profitable. A rettery for extracting the fibre, where a 

 market may be obtained for flax-straw, must be established, before flax- 

 culture can be profitably introduced into any new locality ; and there 

 seems every reason to suppose that the crop may in this way, more 

 generally than has hitherto been the case, obtain a place in the crop 

 rotations of English farmers. 



Grass-land management was discussed at some length at a 

 meeting of the London Farmers' Club, being introduced by an 

 exhaustive paper on the subject from Professor Coleman. Land- 

 draining, and grazing with the use of auxiliary foods given both 

 to cattle and sheep, are the great agents in the improvement of our 

 pastures. The former has always been a profitable operation ; and 

 the latter is becoming more and more so with the rising price of 

 meat in this country. 



Irrigation, which is another great agency in the production of an 

 increased grass-crop, was the subject of discussion by Professor 

 Voelcker, before a recent meeting of the Agricultural Society of Eng- 

 land. His lecture referred especially to the kinds of water 

 suitable for use in this way. These were declared to be specially 

 sewage water ; next, those spring-waters which are of a uniform 

 temperature throughout the year, both because they are thus warmer 

 in the winter and spring months when an early growth of grass is 

 thus promoted, and also because this uniformity of temperature indi- 

 cates that such waters come from considerable depth ; and having 

 thus traversed a large extent of earth and rock, they are the more 

 likely to have dissolved the various mineral matters met with, which 

 are serviceable as the food of plants. Lastly, drainage waters are of 

 service for irrigating the lower lands. And this is of importance, as 

 checking that rapid flow of flood and rainwater from the field to the 

 final outfall in the river, by which, as Mr. Baily Denton has often 

 pointed out, the extension of land drainage is really affecting the 

 water supply of the country ; and, hurrying it straight away to the 

 river, is tending more and more to make floods felt in all the low- 

 lying lands. If by storage for irrigation purposes some use of sxich 



