38 
Some of tlie Agricultural Lessons of 18G8. 
not to be supposed that a wet field, drained last spring and thus 
provided with so many additional exit holes below for the water 
which it held, would thereby be enabled the better to resist a 
drought which was drying it above. Neither can any one imagine 
that to break and stir and turn up deeply, whether by horse- 
power or by steam, any kind of soil during drought would not 
facilitate the drying process. The probability contemplated by 
the questions was, that both drainage and steam cultivation, by 
enabling deep and thorough cultivation, would, wherever they 
had been in operation for some seasons, have so enlarged the 
storehouse of moisture and of fertilising matter within the soil ; 
and, by multiplying the inner surface presented throughout the 
substance of the soil, thus deeply drained and tilled, would have 
so increased the holding power of the storeroom thus enlarged, 
as to have proved a help against the drought. And this proba- 
bility has been abundantly justified by the answers that have 
been received. Wherever the greater depth of land laid open 
to tillage operations by deep drainage had been properly worked 
— whether by steam-power or otherwise — for two or three years 
before 1868, the drought was effectually withstood. On grass 
land, of course, the deepening of the soil and its improvement 
by land drainage goes on more slowly than on ploughed land ; 
and drained grass lands, equally with undrained, were burnt up 
last August ; but they were not generally cracked so deeply, nor 
did they suffer so immediately, nor were they so long in recovering 
on the return of rain. On the clay arable lands of the country, 
on the other hand, there is not a doubt that deep drainage, two 
or three years old, proved very beneficial last year. Such lands 
were cultivated earlier in the season, and a deep tilth was thus 
obtained before the drought set in. They did not crack so much, 
or they did not crack at all. They were not so dry at a given 
depth as soils which had been wet ; on which, therefore, the 
plough could not work until the drought had already come, and 
which were consequently cracked and fissured everywhere. Stiff 
soils, drained and cultivated, did indeed last year retain, up till 
the latest of the drought, moisture enough to feed all the early 
sown crops, whose root-system had sufficiently developed before 
the dry weather of Midsummer. And thus wheat and the earlier 
sown barleys, and even mangold-wurzel, yielded heavy crops 
on such lands wherever the plant as well as the soil had been 
managed properly. The explanation is simple enough. The 
quantity of water and of fertilising matter which a soil will hold 
depends on the extent within the soil of that surface of all its 
particles, by the attractive force of which this water and this 
fertilising matter are retained. Deepen the soil by drainage, and 
reduce it to tilth by cultivation deep enough, and you thus 
