1865.] Agriculture. 647 



Swedes and other turnips are tolerably promising. In the North, and 

 all over Yorkshire and Northumberland, tbey have, however, been 

 destroyed by the grub. And there has been, especially in the cotswold 

 country, an extraordinary abundance of the common earwig in the 

 field, to which the failure of the turnip crop is in some places 

 attributed. 



Certainly the annual results of farm management can as properly 

 claim a record in a scientific journal, as the methods and the circum- 

 stances to which they are due. Whether in the vegetable or animal 

 world, they are the truest test and touchstone of what is sound or 

 unsound in those scientific discussions upon agriculture which might 

 seem to claim precedence here. It is on the farmer's own experience, 

 after all, that he must depend for guidance, and not upon the teachings, 

 however confident and unquestionable, of the man of science, absolutely 

 correct though these may be under certain limited conditions, not those 

 perhaps of the field or of the homestead on which the experience of 

 the agriculturist depends. Thus it was, that when Mr. Chadwick, 

 at the discussion some months ago before the Society of Arts, declared 

 his preference of the views of chemists and sanitary philosophers and 

 engineers and gardeners, to those of farmers, on the agricultural 

 utilization of town sewage, he was very properly met by a vigorous 

 assertion of the absolute sovereignty of agricultural experience in the 

 decision of all agricultural questions ; and Baron Liebig's declaration 

 of the intrinsic worth of guano for plant growing, as being under 8Z. 

 per ton, was quoted as an illustration of the folly of any other 

 guidance. Is guano, because so the chemist says, therefore worth rather 

 less than SI. per ton ? No, it is worth rather more than 121. a ton. 

 This indeed Liebig called a ' fancy ' price. On the contrary, it is the 

 real price, as any one going into the guano market will find. Agri- 

 cultural experience of guano during twenty years of a trade exceeding 

 1,000,000L per annum, and over an acreage probably exceeding 1,000 

 square miles every year, has determined its real value to the farmer 

 past all power of chemical authority to upset it : and it is this, not the 

 opinion of the purely scientific man, which affords the only trustworthy 

 agricultural guidance to the farmer. 



We are now on the point of an attempt, on a very large scale, on 

 the part of agriculturists to realize somewhat of the value which 

 chemists tell us that town sewage possesses. The Metropolitan Sewage 

 Company has been fairly launched, and will proceed at once to carry out 

 its plans for enclosing the Maplin Sands from the sea, and for convey- 

 ing London sewage thither ; and we shall in a very few years know 

 certainly all that living plants, upon the scale of agriculture, and 

 under the circumstances of South Essex soils and climate can tell us 

 of the real, as distinguished from the ' fancy ' price which the great 

 German chemist puts on diluted town drainage. 



The Cattle Plague. — The statistics of agriculture are of the same 

 commercial and practical, as well as scientific interest, with regard to 

 the live stock portion of the farmer's property, as they possess in 

 respect of his corn fields. This branch of the subject is indeed of 



