Steam Culture. 
429 
a ready supply of tiles, the prejudice in favour of the buslies 
for the drains soon gave wav, and tall broad fences disappeared. 
In the few cases in which tunnel tiles were made at home by 
machinery and delivered at their real cost price, many minor 
ditches were doomed. 
As fuel became cheap, the pollards, with their inferior tops, 
their g-narled trunks, and intrusive roots, became a nuisance. 
\yhere the elm was the rceed of the soil it was rated accord- 
ingly ; even as timber, great judgment being required in its 
seasoning and use to render it otherwise than dear at a gift, in 
competition with the home-groAvn larch, or lightly-taxed foreign 
timber. 
Science of late has given her aid, and shown how small a 
portion of the rain-fall is carried away through the outfalls, even 
of a well-drained field,* and consequently how large a portion 
passes off by evapora'tion ; and she also teaches us how much that 
evaporation is under our control, and dependent upon the admis- 
sion of a free circulation of air, and therefore on the removal of 
small enclosures and high fences. On many grounds, therefore, 
the enterprising tenant has already even ventured his own money 
in enlarging his fields and improving their shape, thus becoming 
an unconscious ally of steam-culture. 
One consideration, however, seems to stand in the way of 
these changes — viz., the trees — and that not so much for their 
.value as timber, as for the part they play in our English scenery. 
The Englishman who has hailed the cheery landscapes of Kent, 
after a journey through "La Belle France," not by the railroad 
running in the valleys, but by the hill-climbing pave, or who has 
opened his eyes in amazement to find that some western portions 
of the Emerald Isle show scarcely any feature but a succession 
of stone-barriers ; such a man — unless he is an economist and 
nothing more — will hardly turn a deaf ear to an appeal on behalf 
of our trees. 
But then there is a wide difference between an appreciation of 
the picturesque, and individual-tree-worship ; and devotees of this- 
class are not less at issue with the landscape-gardener, than they 
are with the agricultural reformer. 
The landscape-gardener of the present day is as keenly bent 
on getting distance — vistas, at all hazards, as the tree-worshipper 
who has reluctantly called in his services, is bent on preserving 
from the axe as many of his favourites as possible. Conceptions 
of the beautiful are diverse and fluctuating. How almost anta- 
gonistic is English and French taste in this respect ! where the 
' ■ * See Mr. Bailey Denton's article on ' HinxTTOrth Drainage,' Koyal Agricultura 
Society's Journal, vol. xx. p. 275, and tables. 
2 G 2 
