On Layi)i(j down Land to Permanent Grass. 239 
out his whole book that he started and continued his experi- 
ments unbiassed by prejudice? I must add that Donaldson, in 
his list of seeds, gives a smaller proportion of rye-grass and a 
larger proportion of cocksfoot than most writers on the subject. 
I would next refer to the article of the late Mr. T. Car- 
rington ('Journ.' Hoy. Agric. Soc., vol. xv, p. 490), than 
whose opinion there are few more valuable, he says : " No 
person who has not had experience will appreciate fully the 
difficulty and tediousness of the operation of converting into 
really good turf, ])oor strong land which has been constantly 
under the plough for generations, and in which every bit of 
vegetable matter has been used up by the practice of having 
periodical dead fallows dressed with lime," 
I can fully endorse what Mr. Carrington says, although I have 
never had to deal with land treated in the way he mentions. I 
have, nevertheless, had to deal with land extremely exhausted, 
but the difficulty with such land since I gave up sowing rye- 
grass has been greatly lessened, although, notwithstanding high 
feeding with decorticated cotton-cake, it still takes a long time 
when the land is exhausted to make it rich enough to grow 
grass. But my experience has proved that when land will not 
grow gr.ass it will not grow grain-crops either, unless the land 
intended for pasture is treated in the same way as it would be 
for corn, that is, by fallowing or manuring. In the list of seeds 
given by Mr. Carrington (Table III.), nearly one-fifth is rye-grass 
(one third of this quantity being Italian rye-grass), and nearly 
two-fifths clovers and rib-grass, so Jiat only two-fifths consisted 
of perennial grasses (of which quantity little more than one-third 
was made up of the better grasses). I am satisfied that nothing 
but his liberal use of decorticated cotton-cake and his laying 
the grass down with rape, could have caused the small quantity 
of permanent grass-seed so to tiller out as to make his splendid 
new pastures. It is obvious from Mr. Carrington's article that 
he farmed his pastures, and would not leave them to nature, as 
most people do. 
Mr. James Howard, M.P., in his report on laying down 
land to grass ('Journ.' Roy. Agric. Soc, vol. xvi.), does not in 
any way mention what seed he uses, and I therefore conclude 
that he has not paid much attention to the properties of 
different grasses. He says that in his first experience his 
pastures began to fail after three or four years, and never until 
the tenth year were the grasses well established, and he came to 
the conclusion that there was much truth in the Suffolk couplet, 
" To break a pasture will make a man, 
To make a pasture will break a mau." 
