at Home and Abroad. 
135 
Will soon, I think, be bad, nasty. The fibre and character of 
the grass all there, stalk and all, but black with a slimy ad- 
mixture, as though pond-mud. The grave, or silo, is wet — too 
wet. The original sin of the silo." Next day (January 29) 
his Lordship wrote : — " After writing to you yesterday I went 
to look, and the pony had eaten up the 1875 silage, — a clean- 
licked manger. I had mixed in the bucket of silage a handful 
or two of corn and bran." 
The use of silos for the preservation of green fodder, other 
than " sour grass,"' appears to have been commenced in 1861 by 
Herr Reihlen, of Stuttgart, who first published an account of 
his procedure in a letter dated April 1862, and communicated 
to the Wiirttemberg ' Wochenblatt,' This was followed by 
another letter from the same gentleman, dated September 23rd, 
1865, and published in the same newspaper, in which the 
procedure employed from the commencement, as well as 
the results obtained, are further described. Translations of 
these letters and of some other documents were communicated 
by !M. Vilmorin-Andrieux to the ' Journal d' Agriculture 
Pratique,' edited by my friend M. Lecouteux, an honorary 
member of this Society, and were published therein in the 
numbers which appeared on June 23rd, July 7th, and July 14th, 
1870. This was the real commencement of the practice of 
ensilage for the preservation of green fodder for winter use in 
France ; and therefore it will be desirable to give a short notice 
of what M. Reihlen actually did so long as twenty years ago, 
especially as English and American writers have generally 
ignored the name and the services of this original adapter of 
the old process for the preservation of grass and grain.* 
It is always interesting to learn the motives or necessities 
which have led up to inventions, and fortunately in this case 
the information is quite definite, both as to the original con- 
ception by M. Reihlen and the subsequent adoption by French 
farmers. It is well known that in Germany most large farmers 
grow extensive areas of sugar-beet, and that the leaves of the 
plants are used as green fodder in the autumn. The oxen, 
which will be fattened on beetroot-pulp during the winter are 
* Most English writers on ensilage during the last two years have followed 
several American authors in saying that M. Goffart made his first experi- 
ment on ensilage with Indian com, in 1852. This is a mistake. What M. 
Goflfart says is that in 1852 he began to study practically the important problem 
of the preservation of forage (" C'est a Burtin que, des 1852, j'ai commence' a 
etudier pratiquement I'important problems de la conservation des fourrages"). 
He also states (p. 185, 4th Edition), that until 1873 he had scarcely believed in 
the possibility of preserving green maize, but in that year he was very successful, 
chiefly by accident, and he gives (p. 186) the following statement of what he 
heard his foreman say to the workpeople : — " M. Goflfart nous fait faire lii unc 
sotte besogne ; il ferait bien mieux de jeter, tout de suite, son mais sur le fumler, 
il faudra toujours qu'il finisse par Ik." 
