8 
Holer l Bake well. 
efficacy and economy of the system before incurring further 
expense. Side by side he had plots of land : two plots, one 
watered, the other not watered ; two again, one watered, the other 
manured ; and again two, one watered from a spring, the other 
from the stream ; so that he could form his estimates of the 
comparative value of irrigation as against other fertilising 
agencies, and of different modes of irrigation. 
Mr. Bakewell’s notion of economising the uses of everything 
within his control did not allow him to forget that water pos- 
sessed other than fertilising power. One purpose to which he 
turned his brook was to make it a cheap and ready means of 
conveyance of crops of turnips and cabbages from the land to 
the buildings, and manure from the buildings to the land. He 
cut, with but little fall, a narrow, silently flowing canal, and 
against the cost had a large reduction of human labour and of 
the expense of horse-power. In the way of carrying out this 
improvement we have an instance of his singular ingenuity in 
devising cheaper and more expeditious methods than anyone 
else could suggest. Floating his turnips down on a flat- 
bottomed boat, he found that the attendance of a man with a 
pole was required to keep the boat from loitering on the way ; 
so he one day hauled his boat on to the bank, discharged of its 
load, which went away easily with the stream and met him at 
the end of the barn on his return. There he placed a man to 
draw out the turnips as they arrived ; but this plan was soon 
superseded by a still more self-acting method : a pit with a 
grate at the bottom of it, the depth of the water at its ingress 
to the pit being measured to the depth of the largest turnip 
below the water-line as it floated, so that roots thrown into 
the canal in the field where they grew were delivered in a heap, 
ready washed, down in the farmyard. 
Economy in the use of straw was a great point with him, 
and he was strongly opposed to the practice of having it trodden 
down in yards, for he regarded it as of much greater value as 
a fertiliser after it had served the purpose of food. His stalls, 
therefore, were so constructed that the animals tied up could 
just stand upon the raised and paved floor with some difficulty, 
or at most with no room to spare. The refuse thus passed 
beyond the standing room to a lower level, and the animal 
lying down gathered itself up on the clean higher pavement, 
without litter. Barns, sheds, and other buildings were fitted 
up with stalls for this purpose, and the manure thus produced 
was kept pure. For some years Bakewell maintained that it 
increased in fertilising value with age, and that it should be 
applied in a dry, crumbled gt&te (like peat dust) ; but in Iqsj 
