CARTER AND CO.'S GARDENER'S VADE-MECUM TOR 1862. 
109 
coating of woody fibre at the expense of the flour of the 
seed ; and this, though possibly conducive to the fecundity 
of the grain, as seed, is injurious to it as food. It is best, 
therefore, to cut the Wheat, crop before the green colour lias 
entirely left the straw ; that, is better fodder, and the grain 
is a better sample for this early cutting. The work of 
harvesting has been already described. The crop may be 
20 bushels, or it may be 50 ; a good crop is 5 quarters per 
acre. There are more acres growing Wheat now than there 
used to be, and its progress probably extends with every 
extension of good agriculture. Thus, during the three 
years of the Scottish Agricultural Statistical Inquiry, it 
measured from 4$ per cent, of the arable land in 1854, 
up to 7$ per cent, in 1857, the average in these three 
years being 168, 191, and 202 thousands of acres re- 
spectively. 
The application of manure to Wheat may be so far 
referred to, as simply to declare that it is the general ex- 
perience that in wet seasons 1 cwt. of sulphate of am- 
monia, or 1£ cwt. of nitrate of soda, or 2 cwt. of Peruvian 
guano, applied broadcast before or after Spring harrowing, 
are, on lands needing manure, amply repaid in the crop. 
NOVEMBER. 
Wheat-sowing before winter should be finished in November. It is the harvest month for all kinds of roots. Potatoes 
should be all up and in safety early in November. Mangold Wurzel should bo pulled and pitted. Last year a great 
destruction by frost took place in the last week of October. All Swedes which it is intended to harvest should be pitted 
as soon as possib ! e. Carrots and Parsnips should be dug. 
The Horse-labour includes, therefore, a great deal of cartage, and besides this, there is the ploughing and cultivation still 
pursuing of the stubbles, and of leas for Oats. 
The Hand-labour of this month is very laborious wherever a great deal of the root crop is pulled and carried home. 
It includes too a good deal of work connected with the thrashing of grain, which now proceeds, if only for the provision of 
straw for cattle, which are now brought into their winter quarters. 
Tillage. — We place a short account of this subject here, 
notwithstanding that it is earlier in the year when it is 
most available. The powers of a soil, both as a laboratory 
in which food for plants is prepared, and as a warehouse 
in which it is stored, depend on the quantity of internal 
superficies which it contains. All surfaces have great at- 
tractive power, by which they retain the particles which 
touch them. It is this surface attraction which causes 
water to rise in the sponge; and when the quantity of 
internal surface is very great in a given quantity of* any 
porous body, it exerts enormous power of retaining and 
absorbing that which it holds. A clay holds firmer than 
a sand what it contains, just because of the enormously 
greater surface in a given quantity of it, which, owing to 
its much finer particles, it possesses. And it was Jetliro 
Tull who first attributed the fertilizing effects of tillage 
operations simply to their influence in breaking down the 
soil, and so increasing the extent of inner surface which a 
given quantity of soil would then contain. This greater 
surface both attracted and collected a greater quantity of 
the fertilizing particles of the air, and gave greater scope 
for the rain-water to dissolve out the fertilizing particles 
of the soil, and it afforded a greater pasturage, so to speak, 
from which the roots of plants could gather the greater 
abundance of food which was thus provided for them. 
And after all that has been said and written since Tull’s 
time, this is as nearly as possible all that can be said of the 
way in which fertility depends on tillage. 
Tillage includes those field operations of the farm whose 
object is the production of tilth, — a state in which land, 
neither hardened by drought nor saturated with water, is 
so far reduced to powder that air and moisture have 
free access throughout it. 
Some years ago, in a lecture before the Highland Society, 
Dr. Madden, now of Brighton, exhibited diagrams in 
which he represented soil in the state to which ploughing, 
harrowing, and rolling bring it, as actually observed under 
the microscope. His figures represented it as a collection 
of particles full of pores and cavities, the channels between 
the particles being filled with air, while the particles 
themselves were saturated with water. It is probable that, 
to some extent at any rate, these diagrams were speculative — 
not strictly pictures of what the microscope really exhibited ; 
but it is certain that they tally in some very important 
points with the known results of tillage operations on the 
soil. Thus, in the first place, well-stirred soil holds more 
air than it previously did. This will be plain to any one 
who shall dig u hole in the hardened ground, and then at- 
tempt to restore the earth he has taken out: the heap 
remaining over, which he canflot replace without pressure, 
thus obviously indicating the bulk of additional air which 
has been introduced into the land by disturbing it. And 
that by tillage the quantity of moisture retained by the soil 
is greatly increased, is plain to any witness of the effect of 
horse-hoeing between the rows in a turnip field previous 
to and during a drought. That both air and moisture 
should be more largely held in a soil after tillage might be 
expected from the fact that all tillage operations, by re- 
ducing clods and breaking up fragments in the soil, and 
so miutiplying the number of particles in a given quantity, 
increase the quantity of surface within the soil — that internal 
superficies , as Jethro Tull called it, on which, as he saw, the 
quantity of food for plants which the soil provides so mate- 
rially depends, and on which, as we now know, not only does 
the extent of pasturage for roots depend, but the quantity 
of that absorptive power as well, which enables the soil to 
gather from the air ammoniacal and other matters fit for 
use by plants. 
If we still use the language of theory, then it appears that 
tillage promotes fertility by increasing the quantity of 
surface within the soil off which rain-water can wash 
the food of plants already there, on which, by direct at- 
traction, atmospheric food for plants will gather, and by 
means of which the vegetable and other matters capable 
of supplying food for plants are spread out for more easy 
treatment by the chemicals of the air, the water, and the 
land. As to the influence of air and of rain-water upon 
the mineral matter in the soil, the actual manufacture of 
the soil from the parent rock is a sufficient illustration ; and 
their influence on the vegetable matter in the soils is proved 
by the disappearance of the manure which we apply, and 
by the fact, of which the chemist tells us, that while there are 
only four parts of carbonic acid gas in 10,000 parts of 
common air, that taken from a soil manured seven months 
before contained twenty times as much, while the air of a 
recently manured soil holds 200 times the quantity of 
carbonic acid, the product of the chemical decomposition 
of vegetable fibre. 
The real extent, therefore, of any farm, is not merely 
that which meets the eye, or is exhibited on the map; 
it is the quantity of inner surface on which the roots can 
feed, as well as the quantity of outer surface on which the 
crop can ripen, that ought to be taken into account, and 
that is taken into account when anybody goes on the land 
to value it. 
The truth, in short, may be represented thus : — The in- 
crease of our crops, in so far as it depends upon the soil, 
depends on that which water can extract from it, for it is 
