Heceni Experiences in laying doivn Land to Grass. 153 
tlae number of stock they can carry iu the combined pasture and 
arable system of farming, the result should be profitable. 
Mr. James Howard, at Clapham Park, near Bedford, gave 
me an opportunity of seeing his pastures. The soil is rather 
stifi clay, difficult to work, and of the class of soil that does 
not very readily accommodate itself to the operation of grass- 
sowing. The style of farming is decidedly liberal, manures 
and feeding-stuffs being by no means spared, and there is a 
very healthy good-looking covering of lierbage all over in con- 
sequence. I particularly noticed some fields laid down with 
sainfoin. The sainfoin is drilled in a corn crop in the ordinary 
way in springtime, and afterwards the grass seeds are sown ; in 
course of time the sainfoin dies out and the grasses are left to 
form the pasture, the important thing being that the sainfoin 
produces valuable hay or forage during the years that the grasses 
are establishing themselves. 
At the Royal Agricultural Society's experimental farm at 
Woburn, and at Dyson's Wood in Oxfordshire, where Mr. 
Martin J. Sutton carries on experiments in gi-ass-growing 
and manuring, I saw much of interest. I also had the advan- 
tage of walking over the grass-fields and the experimental 
grass-plots with Sir John B. Lawes at Rothamsted. The gi'ass- 
plots, where different artificial manures have been applied for 
many years — always the same manure to the same plot — are 
an education in manuring in themselves. Stepping from one 
plot to another it sometimes seemed like going into another 
country, the herbage was so totally different, one plot hardly 
containing a plant of the gi'ass that is the chief constituent 
of the next; and yet it was all the same old pasture — a 
portion of the park — when the trials commenced, thirty j-ears 
ago. 
I saw some very successful examples of laying land to gi'ass 
in the Wealden country south of Reigate. There Mr. John 
Glutton was kind enough to go over his fields with me, and to 
show me pastures laid down, at almost any time in living 
memory, with or without a crop, or sown in spring, summer, or 
autumn. Also one specimen of a pasture made by inoculation, 
where the turf had been carted on to the land, then chopped up 
and rolled down, the field differing now not at all in appearance 
from one sown in the usual way. 
This article being of a composite nature, it is open to readers 
to form their own opinions from what has been put before them. 
On the whole, I gather from the answers to my questions, and 
from independent inquiries and observation, that recent experi- 
ences in laying land down to grass have not been very encourag- 
ing. "Wei'e we dealing with low prices that admitted of no 
change or improvement, it might be wise to convert all the land 
