20 
On the Farming of Bliddlesex. 
remaining copses or plantations meets may be deemed a result 
of the demand created by the wants of London and its suburbs. 
There are woods to the east, near Highgate and Enfield, but 
the largest in the county are the Park and other woods in the 
parish of Ruislip, which give a certain degree of wild and pictur- 
esque character to that district ; a character enhanced by the com- 
pensation reservoir of the Grand Junction Canal, which forms 
a broad and handsome sheet of water between the two principal 
woods. 
Present State of the Daiuies. 
Though so large a breadth of Middlesex is under grass, it is 
not fitted for dairying. It is not only of old custom, but because 
the sale of hay in the London markets is a convenient and ready- 
way of disposing of the produce, with an easy way of main- 
taining the fertility of the soil by the return of dung, that the 
few dairy farms in the neighbourhood of London can be accounted 
for. The soil is essentially ill fitted to maintain dairy stock in 
the mode practised in the Vale of Aylesbury and other kindred 
districts. Indeed the system of dairies and the supply of Londort 
with milk seems to have undergone little change since the days 
of Baird and Wilkinson in 1793 and 1813. Baird, speaking 
of the cows kept at Hackney, Islington, and Paddington, describes 
a Mr. West as keeping at one time 999, never having attained 
the 1000 ; of these it is said 300 were in one yard, the food and 
method of feeding being much the same then as now ; for though 
from 6Z. to lOZ. would not now represent the price of a Ilolder- 
ness or other in-calf cow, yet hay, grains, and turnips, with other 
roots, were then as now the staple of their food, varied also with 
vetches, cabbages, and grass, with which latter the localities 
named were formerly covered. Middleton, quoting a Mr. Foot, 
gives the number of cows kept in and on the confines of London 
at 7200, while Mr. Morton, in an essay read bef{)re the Society 
of Arts on December 13th, 1865, computes the number, before 
the cattle plague, at 25,000. 
Mr. Morton's elaborate and well digested essay renders it 
impossible to advance anything new on so great and important 
a subject as the supply of one of the chief necessaries of life, 
especially of infant life, to our great and daily increasing metro- 
polis ; excepting, indeed, that he wrote of London milk which 
will not comprehend the country dairies, beyond those whose^ 
produce is sent as milk to London. A butter-making dairy 
on an arable farm has already been mentioned, but this is of 
an exceptional character ; for there are dairies in the towns and 
suburban villages. They have been called into existence rather 
