296 
Afjricullure of Denmark. 
to pay expenses of cultivation ; and lastly, oats are sown once, or 
perhaps several times, before the land is used as pasture. 
Laro^e tracts of heaths and bog- meadows still exist, but year 
by year their area is decreased, and the latter will, no doubt, 
before long be entirely reclaimed. But the cultivation of the 
heaths proceeds somewhat more slowly, because the soil is fre- 
quently of such bad quality that it is not likely to pay, or only 
after a long lapse of time. 
Some of the heaths have been planted with trees, and to these 
I shall refer under the head of Woods and Forests. 
IiiRiGATiON OF Meadows.— In Denmark, numerous bays, 
rivulets, and inlets of the sea, or lagoons, intersect the valleys of 
the country. The principal of these lagoons — the Liimfjord — 
formerly had but one outlet, a narrow channel connected with 
the Cattegat, from which mouth it stretched, in a westerly direc- 
tion, with long windings, across Jutland, expanding, in various 
places, into large sheets of water, containing small islands. In 
1825, during a violent storm, the isthmus between the North Sea 
and the Liimfjord was broken down, so that the northern portion 
of Jutland became insulated ; but this new channel is so shallow 
that it cannot be used for navigation, whilst the opening to the 
Cattegat has also decreased in depth, so as to be available only 
for very small vessels. In the valleys thus intersected there is 
much rich meadow-land, which may perhaps account for the 
fact that artificial irrigation has only been recently and to a small 
extent adopted. The artificial water-meadow was first intro- 
duced thirty or forty years ago from Hanover. At first natives 
of that country were chiefly employed to lay out the necessary 
works, but, as they proceeded on a large scale without considering 
that the supply of water in Denmark did not equal that of 
Hanover, their speculations failed, and this failure tended to 
discourage the introduction of the system. Within the last ten 
or twenty years, however, irrigation on a smaller scale has been 
carried on, principally in the western and southern parts of Jut- 
land, and the abundance of hay consequently produced on an 
indifferent soil has proved of great importance to the large cattle- 
breeders in that province ; it has also been carried out on the 
east coast of Jutland, but not on the islands, where the fall of 
water is seldom sufficient for such a purpose. 
Within a year or two the irrigation system of the model-farms 
in England has been practised by a few of the larger landed 
proprietors in this way : — the manure is dissolved in water, and, 
by the assistance of pumps, forced through subterranean iron 
pipes to the diflcrent fields, where, by the use of the hose, it is 
sjnead over the land. The introduction of this method is too 
recent to enable an opinion to be formed whether it will prove 
