On the Farming of Middlesex. 
The stock, whether neat or sheep-stock, can form but an insig- 
nificant item in the g^reat metropolitan supply, which now, more 
than ever, is due to distant and foreign sources. Soutliall and 
Finchley — the former a general, the latter a market for swine — 
have given place to that of the metropolis, where the number of 
cattle each week bears a large proportion to the whole number 
kept within the limits of the county. The Uxbridge market is 
still the centre for the wheat grown in the arable portion of 
Middlesex and the adjoining parts of Buckingham, though as a 
mart for corn grown beyond those limits it has yielded to the 
metropolitan Corn-Exchange of Mark Lane. 
The Extent of Land withdrawn rnoM Cultivation. 
Without going back to the times when, on the maps of 
Norden and Speed, London extended very little beyond its civic 
limits, and St. Martin's (Charing Cross) and St. Giles were not 
only in name but in fact " in the Fields " — when there was 
an absolute separation between London and Westminster — it is 
in the memory of living men that Hyde Park Corner and Tyburn 
turnpike were the limits of the metropolis, and that the frontages 
of the great thoroughfares which lead from these points — as from 
Islington, Stepney, and other places — were the only buildings 
beyond the stones. Since then, gradually the space included 
within these lines has been covered with buildings. The growth, 
here and elsewhere, of the suburbs of London is to be measured 
rather by square miles than by acres, so as to defy anything but 
a faint approximation to the real quantity taken from cultivated 
space. The last year has seen 925 acres so absorbed. A four- 
mile radius of a circle, struck from Charing Cross as a centre, 
describes a portion of a circle which now includes within it very 
little land not occupied by buildings, and beyond this large 
spaces are built upon. It is only thirty years since the London 
and Birmingham Railway was opened ; since that time, from 
London as a centre, several of the great lines have cut through 
the county in various directions, occupying nearly a hundred 
miles in length, or about 1000 acres of land with the accessaries. 
The metropolitan and suburban branches, like concentric circles, 
are daily extending, and not only occupying a space which, all 
counted, may nearly equal that of the main lines, but are dis- 
placing houses which must be rebuilt elsewhere, and thus in- 
directly occupying space beyond their special requirements and 
adding serious difficulties to the problem where the poorer 
inhabitants are to be housed. Those formed, or projected, and 
in progress, may, exclusive of those parts actually in London, 
occupy at least 500 acres : a quantity not likely to be much 
