presented to the ^Soci^tS des Agriculteurs de France* 167 
Glancing at the exhibition of seeds, the author thinks that 
our seedsmen, in their excessive rivalry, have gone much too 
far in their attempts to produce enormous roots. In the samples 
of grasses exhibited there were only the spikes preserved, and 
not the grasses themselves, so that it was impossible to judge of 
the value of the several species as producers of hay. The exhi- 
bition of English and Foreign hops appears to have much 
interested our visitors, who were struck with the fine specimens 
exhibited by Barth et fils, of Nuremberg, grown in Bohemia 
and Bavaria ; and they regret that their own cultivators, from 
Burgundy especially, should have missed the opportunity of 
showing that their products were fully equal to those of Germany, 
and superior to most of the English exhibits. In the Cote d'Or 
the growth of hops is not sufficient for the consumption, though 
much progress is being made in recent years in their cultivation, 
especially since the loss of Alsace, formerly one of the principal 
hop-producing districts of France. 
There is nothing very striking in the comments on the 
machinery, the attention of our visitors having been mainly 
directed to novelties ; but they say " before leaving Kilburn we 
cannot help making this reflection — the exhibition which for so 
many days has presented to us this imposing spectacle, is the 
exclusive work of one private association. To prepare and to 
organise it the Royal Agricultural Society of England has not 
hesitated to spend more than a million francs. Will our Society 
of French Agriculturists, with all its energy and life, ever attain 
so much power as to try such bold experiments?" 
After a brief retrospect of the farms which the writer had seen, 
he concludes : — 
" Nothing is less like a French farm than an English one ; 
the buildings here are conspicuous by their absence ; one or 
perhaps two yards surrounded by very low sheds, inclosed on 
one side only, and that to the exterior with overlapping boards 
like the sheds of our railway stations, and on the other open to 
the yards. One side of the sheds furnishes shelter for the carts, 
and the many machines and implements which form the ' work- 
ing stock ' of the farm, the other sheds receive the animals 
during the rare intervals in which they leave the fields, and 
even then they are free to pass as they like from shed to yard 
and from yard to shed. The horse stable alone is enclosed, 
while in the yard the manure accumulates and rots. There are 
scarcely any barns, and the few which exist are continually 
being transformed into cattle-sheds. For the same reason cattle- 
sheds have no granaries over them, and are rarely more than 
(two metres) seven feet up to the eaves. 
" One looks in vain for the great kitchen and the patriarchal 
