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THE SOUTHERN PLANTER. 



or peas and wheat as your rotation. I am 

 aware that you are in the habit of leaving 

 seed for two or three years. I do not wish 

 now to express any opinion with regard to 

 that practice ; but I will just state what I 

 consider to be the true theory of crops, 

 taking the four-course system as the rule, 

 and bearing in mind that it may easily be 

 expanded. After draining your land - , and 

 getting it into proper condition, you sow it 

 for turnips. Now turnips are plants having 

 a large development of leaves. They send 

 their roots downward in search of nourish- 

 ment ; they send their large leaves into 

 the air. With every breath of heaven 

 that passes over the plant, the leaves ab- 

 sorb the carbonic acid of which I have 

 been speaking; they give out the oxygen, 

 and retain the carbon ; they absorb the 

 ammonia from the air, and their roots draw 

 up from the soil the mineral matters; and 

 these, uniting together, are the sources of 

 the materials which the turnip stores up 

 in the form of its bulb. The turnip intends, 

 from these accumulated materials, to pro- 

 duce turnip seed. But you, gentlemen, step 

 in and say — " We don't want turnip seed; 

 we want mutton or beef." And in order 

 that you may have these, the turnips are 

 eaten by your sheep or bullocks, and the 

 manure produced is used for obtaining a 

 crop of barley. I know you do not feed 

 sheep here to so great an extent as they 

 are ted in the eastern part of the kingdom, 

 but the argument is still the same. The 

 matters, therefore, which the turnips ob- 

 tained from the air are employed in pro- 

 ducing more barley than the land would 

 produce naturally. Barley being a narrow- 

 leaved plant, you obtain for it, by means 

 of the turnip plant, a large amount of the 

 substance which barley most requires; 

 this is put into the soil and taken up by 

 the roots, and is assimilated by the barley, 

 the result being that you produce four or 

 five quarters of barley instead of the one 

 or two quarters that you would obtain 

 naturally. So that you employ, in fact, 

 the great absorbing powers of one plant to 

 assist the smaller powers of another. — 

 You must recollect, however, that if the 

 relative prices of the productions were 

 different, the whole of your operations 

 would be different, so artificial and rela- 

 tive are the processes of agriculture. — 

 Well, with respect to clover, although clo- 

 ver is not a plant with large leaves, it is a J 



plant of great foliage, and every little leaf 

 that it sends into the air sends a rootlet 

 ^lown wards ; so that in exact proportion to 

 'the amount of foliage above the ground 

 will be the quantity of the roots below. — 

 Well, then, supposing it possible that you 

 are constantly feeding off clover in the 

 spring, I would remind you that every 

 time a sheep bites a leaf off, it stops the 

 growth of the rootlet connected with that 

 leaf, for each leaf has its corresponding 

 rootlet; and as it is the roots below that 

 furnish increased nutriment for the wheat, 

 so if you do anything whatever to stop the 

 growth of the roots, you to that extent di- 

 minish the amount of the wheat crop 

 which you intend afterwards to get from 

 the land. Now if, instead of feeding off 

 the clover, you were to cut it twice, re- 

 moving the hay each time, and were then 

 to plough the roots into the land and well 

 work them, you would, I am sure, get a 

 I larger amount of produce from the land 

 I than you can possibly obtain under the 

 system of feeding off. Gentlemen, this 

 may be new to some of you, but it is not 

 the less true. I will give you an instance 

 — I might give you fifty. A friend of 

 mine in Northamptonshire had a field of 

 twenty acres of clover. It was all cut at 

 Midsummer, and the hay removed ; one- 

 half was subsequently fed off, and the 

 other was allowed to grow until Septem- 

 ber when it was cut, and a good crop of 

 hay was removed from the land. A por- 

 tion of each part of the field was then dug 

 up, and the clover roots separately weigh- 

 ed. Where it was cut once and fed once, 

 there were thirty-five hundred weight of 

 roots per acre ; where it was cut twice, 

 there were seventy-five hundred weight of 

 roots per acre — being a difference of two 

 tons of valuable vegetable matter in the 

 soil in favour of the land where the upper 

 growth had been twice cut and wholly re- 

 moved away. It is, you perceive, the 

 decomposition of the clover roots in the 

 land which furnishes the additional amount 

 of manuring matter necessary for the in- 

 tended increased crop of wheat. Having 

 now said all I intended to say with regard 

 to the rotation of crops, I proceed to say a 

 few words with respect to the use of arti- 

 ficial manures. I am persuaded that there 

 is no part of the country which is more 

 likely to derive benefit from the applica- 

 tion of artificial manures than Cornwall. — 



