138 Agriculture and the House of Russell. 
and carried out a splendid system of drainage on all his 
clay soils. At a time when the over-preservation of game was 
fashionable he set his face against it, and, although keeping the 
shooting in his owti hands, he gave his tenantry liberty to course 
the hares. In his time the " Park Farm " was admirably 
managed, the turnip husbandry especially being of the highest 
order. (The arable land has since been laid down to grass, 
and thrown into the Park). He kept a splendid herd of 
Herefords, and a magnificent flock of SouthdoAvns, and for many 
years there were at the Park Farm, Christmas sales of some cf 
the finest bullocks, sheep, and pigs the country could produce. 
In 1849-51 the Duke gave facilities to Mr. Lawes and Dr. 
Gilbert for some interesting experiments on the fattening of 
oxen, the results of which were communicated ten years after to 
the Society's Journal.^ The Duke placed at the disposal of the 
experimenters, for the purposes of this inquiry, his numerous 
feeding boxes and fattening oxen at the Woburn Park Farm, the 
special advantages of which were the selection from and dealing 
with large numbers of animals, and the facility afforded by the 
box system for the collection and preservation of the manure — 
to determine the quantity and composition of which constituted 
an important object of the experiments. The Duke became a 
Governor of the Royal Agricultural Society on succeeding to 
the title, and maintained his association with it until his death 
at the age of seventy-three, in May, 1861, when he was suc- 
ceeded by his only son, William, the eighth Duke, born in 1809.^ 
The eighth Duke was always more or less an invalid ; and a 
large shai-e of the management of the family estates thus fell 
upon his cousin and heir presumptive, Francis Charles Hastings 
Russell, eldest son of Major-General Lord George William Russell, 
G.C.B., second son of John, 6th Duke of Bedford, K.G. Lord 
George William Russell was for some time Envoy Extraordinary 
and Minister Plenipotentiaiy at Berlin ; and thus his family were 
chiefly educated abroad. Mr. Hastings Russell, as he was called, 
served for a time in the Scots Guards, and became in 1847, at the 
age of twenty-eight, Member of Parliament for Bedfordshire, a 
position which he retained until his succession to the Dukedom, 
' Journ.al B.A.S.E. 1st Series, Vol. XXII. (1861), p. 200. 
-' For the explorations in the British Museum and other mines of informa- 
tion relating to the past, which have resulted in the unearthing of so many 
interesting facts as to the earlier Dukes of Bedford, I am chiefly indebted to 
the literary acumen and assiduity of my friend Mr. Francis Ford. My sources 
of information a.s to the ninth Duke are too numerous to be here chronicled ; 
but my thanks are especially due to Sir John Lawes, Mr. Dent, Mr. Charles 
Howard, and to the past and present managers of the Woburn Experimental 
Farm, Mes3rs._Malden, Fraser, and Elliott. 
