On the Reclamation of Feat-Land in the Netherlands. 449 
first picking possessing the best quality. The men who do 
the work get half the proceeds for their labour, which includes 
ploughing and other acts of cultivation, sowing, weeding, 
harvesting, and drying. The Company finds manure, seeds, 
frames for raising the plants, implements, and the barn for 
drying the leaves. Each barn is designed to dry the produce of 
about 6 acres, and there are 7 for the 40 acres or so which 
are annually cropped with tobacco. At each end of the barn 
is a cottage for the labourers, and two men are considered 
enouffh to do all the labour for the six acres. Thus the same 
two men always work together, cultivate the same land, use the 
same barn, and divide half the crop, or its value, between them. 
Othei- Crops. — The remaining 160 acres cultivated by the 
Company are farmed as a rule on a four-course shift, viz. : — 
(1.) Potatoes with a double dressing of manure. (2.) Oats, 
rye, or wheat, with a single dressing of manure, and sown out 
with clover. (3.) Clover manured in spring. (4.) Flax with- 
out manure. There is also a little permanent pasture, which 
reduces the area of each break to something under 40 acres. 
The first four years after reclamation the cost of the manure is 
about 6/. 10s. per acre for the whole course, and after that 
period about half as much. The manure used on the estate 
consists almost entirely of the street manure and vendange of 
's Hertogenbosch, which is brought as a return cargo by the 
barges which deliver the peat. The Company pays a small 
sum annually to the authorities of the town for the monopoly of 
the manure. 
As about 25 acres of land are brought into cultivation every 
year, I was able to examine a piece of land which had been just 
reclaimed and had been planted with potatoes as a first crop, a 
second sown with oats as a second crop, a third-year piece 
bearing a crop of clover, and a fourth-year field with its plant 
of flax. The gradual improvement in the agricultural condition 
of the land could be easily seen ; the crops looked remarkably 
well, and the year then (June 1880) promised to be a productive 
one in that locality. Potatoes are said to average 8 tons per 
acre, wheat and rye from 27 to 33 bushels per acre, and oats 
give a very much larger yield. The seed corn is generally 
obtained from Mr. van den Bosch at the Wilhelmina Polder. 
Sheep. — About 400 to 500 sheep are bought annually. 
During the summer they run on the roads and other more or 
less waste places. In the winter they are fattened in sheep- 
stables on beet-root-pulp, oats, linseed-meal, &c., and sell at 
from 21. to 21. 6s. Sd. per head, the best going to England, and 
the rest to Belgium. Very little straw is used for their bedding, 
and the manure is used exclusively for the cultivation of tobacco. 
