66 
Some of the Agricultural Lessons of 1868. 
score of slieep one pint of acorns a-piece dally, with ^ lb. of 
cake, chaff, and a few turnips ; and, paying women and children 
Qd. per bushel for collecting them, he expected them to collect 
more than 200 sacks, besides sending twenty-five score of ewes 
round the outside of the farm to help themselves. These were 
folded at night on a field of beet-tops, and were doing well. He 
considered one pint of acorns equal to a quarter of a pound of 
cake. On the other hand, whether from acorns or horse chesnuts 
— almost certainly from one or other — there was last autumn 
a great deal of fatal illness among cattle grazing In the fields, 
especially in the county of Kent, but also in the Hertfordshire, 
Warwickshire, and other wooded districts. And this the veteri- 
nary authorities attributed to the consumption of excessive 
quantities of so Indigestible a food. 
It is plain, however, that it is not of such petty and merely 
local economies as that of acorn-picking that the past season 
chiefly speaks. Its leading lessons, as represented in the letters 
quoted, are (1) the policy and need of ample liberty of cultiva- 
tion being given to the cultivator ; (2) the importance, by deep 
drainage and deep tillage, of having in the soil and subsoil a 
deep and Avell furnished storehouse of food for plants always ready 
against a time of drought ; (3) the serviceableness (against a like 
contingency) of seed-beds full of plants, especially cabbage and 
kohl rabl plants, which may be transplanted if other crops shall 
fail ; (4) the rapid growth of white mustard, stubble turnips, rape, 
Italian rye-grass, rye, and other useful leaf crops, in the autumn, 
when once the hardened cultivated stubble has been moistened to 
receive the seed ; (5) the independence (thanks to manufactured 
fertilizers), alike of the soil and of the farmer, as regards the rota- 
tion-rules on which good agriculture used formerly to be supposed 
to hinge ; and (6) the serviceableness, for economising food, of all 
those machines which enable us to divide and mix — the chaff- 
machine, the pulper, and the grlnding-mill — and thus, by a small 
quantity of roots and meal, to render nutritive and palatable 
a large quantity of comparatively innutritlous but yet useful 
fodder. 
If, in place of seeking to be taught on all these points by 
the collected and concentrated reports of many during an ex- 
ceptional season, any one shall prefer the lesson of prolonged 
experience on one well-managed farm, I commend to his atten- 
tion the following report by Mr. Randell, of Chadbury, near 
Evesham. I have presumed to append it entire to this collec- 
tion of notes upon the drought of 1868 as a capital Illustration 
of the advantages at once of deep and thorough tillage, and of crop- 
cultivation with especial regard to stock-keeping on a farm where 
formerly little or none were kept ; and also of that advantage 
