170 
Management of Grass Land. 
the arable land can receive its mineral supply from other sources, 
viz., deep cultivation and thorough aeration. The slovenly 
management of grass land, which a few years ago was general, 
and is still too common, would never have been seen if the 
quality of grass could be appraised as easily and certainly as 
that of corn. But it is notorious that even the most experienced 
farmers and graziers can only distinguish between good, mode- 
rate, and bad ; no man living can distinguish by the eye the 
subtle difference in the quality of the herbage which makes one 
very good field worth 1/. an acre more rent than another very 
good field, or one bad field worth less than another equally bad- 
looking field. So long as a grass field grows about the usual 
quantity of grass, and the cattle eat it, the occupier is too apt to 
rest content with the good or bad reputation earned by particular 
fields without any attempt to alter it for the better, or even to 
ascertain whether it is not gradually getting worse. 
In early life I learnt a lesson on this point which I have never 
forgotten. A neighbouring gentleman mowed about 50 acres of 
his park annually, and, not being a farmer, he believed that grass 
was grass, and made equally good hay whether he went to the ex- 
pense of manuring it or not. He was also remarkably indifferent 
on the subject of quantity, saying that he kept a fixed number of 
horses and cows, and if, in a good season, he had a large crop 
they ate it all, and in a bad season they made it do ; so that he 
stuck to his system as long as he lived, and the land got no manure 
but what the horses and cows made. I was thoroughly acquainted 
with this land, and much interested in watching the result. The 
produce grew gradually less, not year by year, or the owner 
would have taken alarm ; but each droughty year that came 
produced a worse crop than the preceding dry season, until I 
have seen the produce of the 50 acres carried home in 19 cart 
loads ! The quality, too, had fallen off quite as much as the 
quantity. In one part of the park, where the land was light, one 
kind of grass (Arena Jlavescens) had taken almost exclusive pos- 
session of the land, and neither cattle nor sheep would graze on 
this portion, except in the most desultory way ; a mouthful here 
and another five yards further on, picked up on the move, showed 
what they thought of the system, and even the hay was sorted 
over rather than eaten by the cows, a large portion being de- 
liberately rejected and trodden under foot. This is an instructive 
instance, showing that the produce of grass land restored to it 
annually, less the value abstracted from it by the animals fed on 
it, will not, when continued for a length of time, prevent ordinary 
grass land from gradual but steady deterioration. It also shows 
how much more rapidly light land deteriorates than that which 
is stronger. The park in question, after being mown for many 
