210 
Experiments on, the Fceclinr/ of Sheep. 
bility of the most important improved breeds of sheep to the 
modern system of early and rapid fattening, by means of liberal 
feeding, combined with shelter from inclement weather. The 
experiments on this subject being- made with large numbers of 
animals also provided reliable data for determining the average 
amounts of food, and of its most important constituents, required 
by a given weight of the animal within a given time, and to pro- 
duce a given amount of increase in live-weight, under the system 
of rapid fattening and early maturity. 
In the last volume of this Journal (vol. xxii. part i.), it was 
shown how great is the expenditure of food to produce a given 
amount of saleable increase when the animals are fed beyond a 
comparatively moderate degree of fatness. 
The results now given show, on the other hand, that there may 
also be a wasteful expenditure of constituents (by the respiration 
and other current functions of the body) in proportion to the 
amount of saleable increase obtained, when the food does not 
contain a sufficient proportion of easily digestible and assimilable 
constituents, or when those constituents are not in part supplied 
to the animal in the succulent condition of its natural food. 
It remains to show from the results of the experiments now 
under consideration, whether or not cellulose or woody-fibre, 
which enters so largely into the composition of many of our 
current food-stuffs, is digestible and available for the purposes of 
the animal economy ? and if it be so, in what proportions, and 
whether in greater or less degree according to the character of the 
constituents associated with it ? But, as already intimated, as the 
settlement of these questions requires the determination of the 
cellulose not only in the food consumed but in the excrements 
voided, the consideration of the results relating to them — though 
illustrative of the feeding rather than the manure value of the 
foods — is reserved until we enter into the general question of the 
relation of the composition of the excrements of animals to that 
of the food they consume, 
Jlothamsted, January, 18G2. 
X, — On the lest mode of getting in the Harvest in a had 
Season. An Essay which received the Prize offered by the 
Leeds Local Committee in 1861. By Edwin Eddison. 
There are few subjects more important to the farmer than the 
proper harvesting of his corn. My earliest experience of a wet 
harvest was in the year 1816, when the blackened straw of the 
barley, which looked like smoked stubble in the month of March, 
made a lasting and painful impression on my recollection. 
