The Food of the Peajdc. 
109 
The plants wliic^li are more suitable for general purposes arc 
white mustard, tares (2n(l crop), and rape ; but, whichever be 
employed, it ought if possible to be ploughcd-in, either while it is 
passing into flower or is in actual bloom, for it then possesses 
its maximum of easily soluble and alimentary matter ; it should 
also bc! d(!positcd only deej) enough to prevent the drying 
action of the air, and not so deep that the free play of oxygen, 
which is requisite for decomposition, be excluded. All, or very 
nearly all, known plants impoverish soil principally during the 
period of their forming and maturing their seeds, while the best 
of the fallow crops, being grown for the succulent food of either 
their roots, their leaves, or their stems, are hindered from acting 
impoverishingly. The ground to be benefited by the ploughing- 
in of green crops should be capable of bringing them forth, if not 
luxuriantly, at least with such abundance as to furnish complete 
shade during their growth, and suilicient vegetative matter to 
occasion a rapid fermentation when buried ; this species of ma- 
nure is more appropriate for the preservation of good soils in a 
state of fertility, than to the improvement of the exhausted or 
light soils ; for on such land they grow too feebly to produce 
much effect. This, probably, will in a great measure account 
for the comparative rarity of the practice on extensive farms con- 
taining tracts of poor land. 
N, Euncton, Jung's Lynn. 
VII. — The Food of the People. By Harky Chester. 
How the people are to be fed is the most important question of 
to-day ; and none are so concerned in its solution as those who 
are connected with land, for they not only require to be them- 
selves fed, but are the principal producers of food. 
In November, 1866, the "Society for the Encouragement of 
Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce," appointed a Committee to 
inquire and report respecting the " Food of the People." The 
Committee, which commenced its sittings in the last month of 
that year, is still engaged in its work ; and the object of the 
present paper is therefore to place before agriculturists, not a 
final nor complete statement of the results of the inquiry, but, 
simply, in a compendious form, a few ideas which are founded 
on those results, as far as they had been obtained to the close of 
1867. 
The Right Hon. Henry Austin Bruce, M.P., was appointed 
Chairman of the Committee. It set to work by endeavouring to 
define some limits within which its inquiries should be princi- 
