Tlie late Mr. II. M. Jenkins. 
179 
geologist had rare powers of observation, rare powers of seizing 
upon the essential part of any subject that lay before him, and 
rare powers of subsequent description. And no one reading 
the seventy or eighty pages occupied by Mr. Jenkins's reports 
of several of these farms could imagine that the writer had but 
a year before acknowledged that agriculture was a subject new 
to him. Each farm is described geologically ; and the practical 
management, whether of labourer or of labour, of plough land, 
grass land, live-stock, and of estate improvement and equipment 
— is thoroughly discussed : and any special point deserving 
separate treatment is specially noticed. The protection of the 
buyer of artificial manures by guaranteed samples and analyses 
is pointed out. Exceptional and catch crops have justice done 
to them. Cabbage cultivation is described. The Shorthorn 
herd, the Leicester flock, and the small white pigs at Riby 
have their history related. The management of light land in 
Nottinghamshire — Forest Farming, as the article is entitled — is 
one of his subjects. Mr. Hudson's celebrated Castle Acre Farm, 
Norfolk, occupies another of his reports ; it w^as written in the 
year of Mr. Hudson's death. His loyalty to the simple four- 
course system of cropping, and his gradual abandonment of the 
exceptional catch crops — vetches, early peas and rye — are all 
carefully described. Mr. Bomford's farming at Pitchill in 
Worcestershire, and on his heavy land farms at Grove and 
Tylesford, is the subject of another paper. 
^Ir. Bomford was an enthusiastic steam cultivator, and an 
I elaborate account of the economy of steam-power on these farms 
is given. The cleansing of foul clay-land is described field 
by field — successive fallows, clay burning, mowing the twitch, 
\ and burning the land ; steam cultivation, with every alternate 
I tine of the drag removed lest the tool should be choked — 
j the young savant is already familiar with the various field 
i phrases of the steam-cultivator, and he speaks of the soil being 
smashed, and burst up, and otherwise shattered, like the "old 
I salt " in these matters which he rapidly became. In addition to 
the farms here named, Mr. Jenkins visited Cheshire for the first 
time that year, going over Mr. Jackson's farm at Tattenhall, 
along with Mr. Statter, then a Member of the Council. It was, 
however, to the ordinary farm management, not to the dairying, 
that he referred in his report. One pregnant remark, however, 
may be quoted from him. " Good cheese-making," he says, 
" by no means necessarily comes of good farming, any more 
than good bread is invariably the product of good wheat." 
It is of course impossible to go through the successive volumes 
of the long series edited by Mr. Jenkins in detail. I have 
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