174 
Iiifliience of Climate on Cultivation. 
Requiring a considerable quantity of moisture to maintain their 
healthy growth, they are easily hurt during periods of drought, 
and are not remunerative for liberal treatment. Were it not for 
the difficulty of keeping such soils clean, wheat would jield 
nearly double the value oats would do ; but oats, checking the 
growth of weeds in their early stages, leave the land much cleaner 
and more easily managed when under preparation for green crops. 
On the other hand, oats generally turn to good account nitrogenous 
manures applied on clays or deep loams ; they are not so liable 
to suffer from over-luxuriance as barley, and are altogether a much 
grosser feeding plant. Soils abounding in vegetable matter 
yielding nitrogen afford manure to the oat crop in the best 
possible form. 
It is generally found that the latest varieties of oats are the 
most productive : though this is best seen when cultivation is in 
a backward state. In Scotland, when the soil was poorer and in 
a worse condition, the harder and later varieties of oats were 
preferred. By their growth being extended over a longer period, 
they had greater powers of abstracting food both from the soil 
and atmosphere. The potato oat is no doubt a productive variety, 
but it requires to be early sown and liberally manured to yield 
well. 
Kilwldss, 1859. 
XIII. — Account of the Application of Steam Power to the Cultivation 
of the Land. By John Algernon Clarke. 
Prize Essay. 
After some three hundred im'entions in steam culture have 
received the protection of the Great Seal — from the seventeenth 
century to the present time ; after the working out of numerous 
ideas for this object, not to be found among the blue pamphlets 
of tlie Patent Office ; with the steam plough "a fact," and thou- 
sands of acres in Great Britain broken up or turned over by 
steam-driven tines and shares, — it is high time for the Society's 
Journal to sum up the extent of our progress in realising the 
great triumph of agriculturiil mechanics and the farmer's long- 
expected boon. The history of steam ploughs, steam grubbers, 
steam spades, and novel machinery for tilling by new inodes of 
action unlike those of manual or animal labour, would be a long 
story ; and speculations upon what might have been accomplished 
with c(mtrivances never carried beyond the embryo of promise on 
paper, would l)e of small moment in comparison with descriptive 
particulars of mechanism really tested and laboriously improved 
