SOUTHERN CULTIVATOR. 
53 
enriches the land. By adding a little lime to this natural 
source of fruitfulness, the owner of pine lands will great- 
ly enhance their value. They can be changed permanent- 
ly from the production of coniferous plants to that of cere- 
als— a difference as wide as that from a loaf of bread made 
of pine sawdust to one made of wheat flour. 
The difference in a soil that will yield pine wood 
abundantly, but wheat and maize very sparingly, is the 
pivot of plant rotation, to which the reader’s attention is 
particularly invited. The volatile alkali called ammonia, 
which abounds in Peruvian Guano, works this change in 
piney woods land for one or tv/o crops, in a remarkable 
degree. Wood ashes also produce signal effects on such 
soils, being far more lasting than guano. Alkalies in some 
form appear to be necessary to change a pine-growing soil 
into one adapted to the cheap and permanent production of 
oaks, hickory and grain. 
Numerous facts similar in purport to those above stated 
are well knov/n to every observing farmer ; but the rea- 
sons suggested by Professor Johnston and others, why 
pine trees succeed oak forests, and the latter, or beech, or 
other hard deciduous trees succeed pines, do not appear 
to us entirely satisfactory. On the rich lands of the West- 
ern States, and in Western New York, when beech and 
maple, or oak-bearing soils are left to grow up a second 
time in forests, they do not, like the comparatively poor 
land of New Jersey, Delav/are, Maryland, Virginia, North 
and South Carolina and Georgia, produce a crop of old- 
field pines, but a second growth of the trees of the primi- 
tive forest. Coniferous plants never supersede those of a 
higher order and more complex development where the 
latter can flourish. 
If pines drive out oaks and poplars, it is because the lat- 
ter find an uncongenial soil, made so not by nature, but 
by the labor of man. Nature never rotates her vegetable 
productions from a higher to a lower order of organism, 
if her developments are not molested. The deeply des- 
cending tap-root of pine, its light wind-driven seed, and its 
abundant foliage, fit it, in an eminent degree, to recuperate 
impoverished old fields, and prepare tlie surface of the 
ground to bear a crop of oaks, or corn or cotton. The 
growth of pines does not, however, necessarily induce the 
growth of oaks or beeches; for there is no reason to sup- 
pose that the pine forests of North and South Carolina and 
Georgia have not flourished on the same surface for 
twenty successive generations of trees. There is no evi- 
dence of a natural system of a rotation of plants from 
pine to oak, and oak to pine. L.' 
To DnsTuoY Pf.ach Tree Insects. — A very intelligent 
writer in the London Gardeners Magazine, who had tried 
many experiments to preserve the peach tree in health, 
gives the following as the best composition for this pur- 
pose; 
“Take half a peck ef unslacked lime, a quarter of a 
peck of soot, two pounds of soft soap and one pound of 
sulphur. Upon these warm water is poured, till the whole 
mass becomes of a creamy consistency. This composition 
is applied to the whole tree — trunk and branches, with a 
cloth or sponge, as hot as the hand can bear it. The pro- 
per time of using this wash is immediately after pruning 
in the spring. 
THE BULL’S BING. 
0ns mode of making rings for bull's noses, consists of 
two semi- circles, constituting a circle or ring, joined to- 
gether at one end, a, w'lth a rivet passed through the ends 
lapping over each other, after each end is redu'^ed to half 
the thickness of the ring, and acting as a hinge ; and the 
other two ends, b, also lap, and are fastened together with 
two countersunk screws. The ring is opened, as shown 
in fig. 1, before it is passed through the hole in the bull’s 
nose. Fig. 2 shows the ring screwed together as it hangs 
in the bull’s nose; the joint, a, closed, and the lapped ends, 
b, also closed with the two countersunk screws, all flush 
with the surface of the ring. The ring is formed of quar- 
ter inch rod-iron, and its di- 
ameter over all is two and a 1) 
half inches. T h e surface 
should be very smoothly filed, 
and it cannot be too highly 
polished with sand paper. 
The ring is put into the 
young bull’s nose in this man- 
ner ; — Let the person who 
puts the ring into the bull’s 
nose, be provided with an 
iron rod about a foot long, the bull’s ring. 
tapering to the point, and 
rather thicker than the rod of the ring. Let a fire be near 
to heat the point of this rod. He should also be provided 
with a small screw-driver. Let a long, stout cart-rope be 
provided with a noose hitched upon the middle, just large 
enough to take in the bull’s neck like a collar. Put the 
bull into any out- housed; that has a window sufficiently 
low to allow his head to reach through it, though it is safer for 
his knees to press against his counter a stout bar of wood. 
Slip the top of the loop of the rope over his head down to 
the counter, bring his breast against the window or bar, 
pass the rope from the lowest part of his neck along the 
ribs on each side round his buttocks, like a breeching, and 
bring an end through the window or over the bar on eacL 
side of the bull, where let a stout man hold on at each end 
of the rope, and prevent the bull retreating backwards 
from the window or bar. A man stands on each side of 
the bull’s buttock, to prevent him shifungfrom one side or 
the other. A man also stands on each side of the bull’s 
head, holding on by the horn, or by the ear if he is horn- 
less, with one hand, and keeping out the nose by support- 
ing the jaws with the other. The operator having the 
iron rod given him by an assistant, heated in the fire just 
red enough to see the point in dayliglit, he takes the bull 
by the nose, with his left hand, and feeling inwardly wnth 
his fingers, past the softpart of the nostrils, until he reach- 
es the cartilage or septum of the nose, he distends the ori- 
fice of the nostrils, so that the hot iron may pierce clear 
through the septum without touching the skin of the nos- 
trils or his own fingers, taking care to pass the iron in a 
direction exactly parallel to the front of the nose, other- 
wise the hole will be pierced ob- 
(^Fig. 2.) liquely. Immediately after t h e 
tapering rod has been passed as far 
as to make the hole sufficiently 
large for the ring, and the wound 
seared enough, the operator then 
taltcs the ring opened (still holding 
by the bull’s nose w’ith his left hand) 
passes one end of it gently through 
the hole, and, on bringing the two 
endstogeteher, lets go the nose with 
the left hand, and taking hold of 
tlie ring w'ith same, still to command 
the bull, puts one screw' in after 
another, and secures each firmly with the screw driver. 
He then turns the ring round in the hole, to feel that it 
moves easily, and to see that it hangs evenly, after all 
which the bull is released. The ring should not be used 
until the wound of the nose is completely healed ; though 
it is nothing uncommon to see the ringing of a bull delayed, 
until the lime arrives that he must be led by it for some 
particular purpose, such as the exhibition fora premium at 
a show, when, in '.he attempt to accustom him to be led 
THE BULL 3 RING .4S F.iS 
PENED in his xNOSE. 
