Clover as a Preparatory Crop for Wheat. 
399 
In accordance with a mathematical formula which men may 
fancy they have discovered, and hy which they may suppose the 
development of our corn-crops to be governed. Even great men, 
by taking too general, or as it is often erringly termed, a com- 
prehensive view of agricultural matters, sometimes totally mis- 
represent the very law they are endeavouring to establish. 
The patient investigation of many of the details, with which 
those only are perfectly familiar whose daily occupation is in the 
field or in the feeding-stall, is however often rewarded by success. 
Mysteries which puzzle the minds of intelligent farmers are 
cleared up, the influences which modify a general rule or practice 
in farming operations are clearly recognised, and by degrees 
principles are established, which, assigning the benefits or dis- 
advantages of a certain course of proceeding to their real cause, 
must ever tend to confirm the experienced in good practice, and 
afford valuable hints in guiding those inexperienced in farm 
management. 
In the course of a long residence in a purely agricultural 
district, I have often been struck with the remarkably healthy 
appearance and good yield of wheat on land from which a heavy 
crop of clover hay was obtained in the pi'eceding year. I have 
likewise had frequent opportunities of observing that, as a rule, 
wheat grown on part of a field whereon clover has been twice 
mown for hay is better than the produce of that on the part 
of the same field on which the clover has been mown only once 
for hay, and afterwards fed off by sheep. These observations, 
extending over a number of years, led me to inquire into the 
reasons why clover is specially well fitted to prepare land for 
wheat, and in the paper, which I have now the pleasure of laying 
before the readers of the Journal, I shall endeavour, as the result 
of my experiments on the subject, to give an intelligible explana- 
tion of the fact that clover is so excellent a preparatory crop for 
wheat as it is practically known to be. 
By those taking a superficial view of the subject, it may be 
suggested that any injury likely to be caused by the removal of a 
certain amount of fertilising matter is altogether insignificant, 
and more than compensated for by the benefit which results from 
the abundant growth of clover roots and the physical improve- 
ment in the soil which takes place in their decomposition. 
Looking, ho^yever, more closely into the matter, it will be found 
that in a good crop of clover-hay a very considerable amount of 
both mineral and organic substances is carried off the land, and 
that if the total amount of such constituents in a crop had to be 
regarded exclusively as the measure for determining the relative 
degrees in which different farm-crops exhaust the land, clover 
