368 Chronicles of Science. [Juty, 



tried chloroform : of ninety head, five died before treatment, six were 

 not attacked, and no fewer than forty-one recovered. Full-grown 

 beasts had an ounce of chloroform administered to them each time, 

 calves a quarter of an ounce, and others in proportion to their age. 

 A saturated handkerchief was simply put in a bag, which was hung 

 close under the nostrils and tied by a string behind the poll. Five 

 to seven minutes was generally enough to produce insensibility, 

 and the cattle were kept under its influence for periods of from 

 half-an-hour to two hours. Seven or eight doses generally effected 

 a cure; and they seem to have been administered twice a day. 

 The immediate effect was to sweeten the breath of the animal, the 

 inflammation and fever were reduced, and unless these returned 

 within the day, the case was hopeful. The result of all was that 

 in July, the disease having appeared in April, "Mr. Aylmer 

 found himself with a clean bill of health and with upwards of 50 

 per cent, of those which had been treated alive and well in their 

 stalls." Notwithstanding, however, the few examples of treatment 

 which seem, like this one, to have afforded some encouragement, 

 it is still almost universally admitted that our only preventive is to 

 be found in isolation, and our only hope of safety in immediate 

 slaughter. 



The journal of the English Agricultural Society contains in its 

 current number a large mass of very valuable information on the 

 subject of steam cultivation. It has been long admitted that a tool 

 drawn across the land and stirring the soil or ploughing it to its 

 full depth, without trampling it and poaching it as horses do when 

 they are the power employed, must be greatly improved in its 

 efficiency as a tillage implement. Experience has perfectly estab- 

 lished this wherever the thing has been put to the test on clay 

 land; and many a clay-land farm which could not formerly be 

 cultivated except during short intervals of suitable weather, and 

 then only by a staff of horses which must be kept all through the 

 year for the purpose, has since been a standing advertisment of the 

 superiority of that cultivation by steam power, which could be thus 

 rapidly accomplished during the short intervals when alone clay 

 land ought to be touched, and which at the same time involved 

 comparatively little expense when the tools employed lay idle. It 

 was, however, still generally feared that the cost of steam cultiva- 

 tion was excessive, and either beyond the means of ordinary English 

 farmers or so much in excess of the ordinary experience of horse 

 tillage as to be dearly bought. The large number of instances col- 

 lected by the Society's commissioners has now sufficiently cleared 

 up whatever was debatable on the subject. They were instructed 

 to investigate not only the depth and character of steam tillage and 

 the improvements it effected in soil and subsoil, but also the detail 

 of the expenditure incurred — the annual expenses connected with 



