298 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
[August, 
The Preservation of Corn Fodder in Silos. 
Soon after the plan of preserving corn fodder in 
tanks or silos, was published in France, the American 
Agriculturist gave a full account of the matter, and 
reproduced the engravings of the structures used by 
the inventor. These will be found in June 1875; and in 
April 1879, we gave an engraving of a machine invented 
in this country for the wholesale cutting of the fodder. 
Besides there have appeared from time to time other 
articles upon the subject. The matter for two or three 
years appeared to receive but little attention on the part 
•of our farmers, but since accounts of some successful 
•operations in this country have been published, there is 
a widespread interest, and there is no subject upon which 
we have, just at present, more inquiries than those re¬ 
lating to this. “The Ensilage of Maize,” which is very 
nearly the French name for the process, seems to be very 
generally adopted in this country. Silo , is the French 
word for a “ pit ,”—Ensilage means the putting into pits. 
As the pits are built above ground, they have been called 
“tanks,” and we have known the “ tanking of corn fod¬ 
der,” used to express the operation. In view of the 
general desire for information we will endeavor to pre¬ 
sent next month, the substance of what has already been 
given, and such other matter as will allow those who 
may wish to do so to experiment understandingly. The 
preservation of green fodder in a like manner is by 
®o means new; clover has long been similarly stored, and 
so have beet leaves in the sugar-beet fields of Europe; 
in this country brewers’ grains, and partially ripe Broom 
•Corn seed have also been thus preserved. It is applying 
to the preservation of corn fodder the same principle that 
nearly every house-keeper makes use of in preserving 
fruits. Every one knows that if green corn fodder, or 
other green vegetable matter be placed in a heap, fer¬ 
mentation will take place and decay soon follow; fer¬ 
mentation and decay require the oxygen of the air ; ex¬ 
clude the air and these must cease. In Ensilage the com 
fodder is put away with the air excluded and it keeps. 
Every detail of the operation has for its object the thor¬ 
ough exclusion of the atmosphere; the silos, or tanks are 
tight; the fodder cut small, that it may lay more com¬ 
pactly, and great pressure put upon the mass, all for the 
purpose of keeping out the air as completely as possible. 
That the fodder thus put up will keep in excellent con¬ 
dition is an established fact; it has been kept thus not 
only through the winter, but throughout a whole year. 
Do we advise farmers to put away their corn fodder in 
tthis manner? Yes and no, and mostly no. Dairy farm¬ 
ers who carry on business with a sufficient capital, may 
incur the necessary outlay with a prospect of a fair profit 
on the investment, and the same may be said of those 
farmers who carry a large number of animals and can 
afford to make the investment. Bnt with the average 
farmer, the case is different. No half-way work will do, 
the silos must be air tight or their contents will spoil; 
a large mass of corn fodder must be cut fine, and all at 
once, and to do this requires an outlay for machinery and 
power, which most farmers cannot command. There 
must he a large number of animals to consume the fodder 
profitably, when a silo is opened and the contents ex¬ 
posed a change takes place, and the consumption must 
of necessity be rapid or there will be a loss. We look 
apon the process as one that, so far as the average farmer 
is concerned, has yet to be Americanized and adapted to 
his circumstances and needs, and it is in this direction 
that we would encourage experiment. For large opera¬ 
tions the present methods answer; we now wish to have 
a process by which one who keeps from two to six cows 
-can prepare his silos, or preserving receptacles,with but a 
moderate outlay for materials and with ordinary labor; 
and the process needs to be otherwise so modified that 
the cost of putting away his fodder by this method will 
not more than offset its advantages. That this may be 
.accomplished is our sincere hope. But at present it will 
be a great step if the discussion of the matter leads farm¬ 
ers in general to make better use the means they have. 
But a small share of the labor required by Ensilage, ap¬ 
plied to saving the fodder they already have, would re¬ 
sult in great gain. Leaving the matter of fodder corn 
out of the case, the matter of corn fodder deserves far- 
more consideration than many give it; in the cutting up 
of the corn at the proper time and the care of the stover 
after husking, there is abundant room for improvement. 
they are agents. If one’s house is already rodded, how¬ 
ever it may be with lightning, it is no protection from 
the lightning rodder. The chaps will show very plainly 
that a house with the style of lightning-rod it happens to 
have, is just a trifle more unsafe than if it bad no rods 
at all, and of course safety is only to be secured by 
TAKING DOWN THE OLD AND PUTTING UP THE NEW. 
Yellows in the PeacU.— There is no remedy 
for the destructive disease known as “Yellows” in the 
peachtree. When a tree is once attacked it should be 
dug up and burned root and branch, otherwise the 
trouble will spread to other trees and in a short time 
the whole orchard is ruined. 
Entomologist for New York.— The State of 
New York has at length a State Entomologist, Governor 
Cornell having recently given the appointment to Doctor 
Liutner of Albany. There was a movement on the part 
of some of the friends of Prof. C. Y. Riley, now Chief of 
the U. S. Entomological Commission, to secure him as 
the New York Entomologist. Learning of this, Prof. R. 
wrote to Governor Cornell, declining to be considered as 
a candidate, and strongly urging the appointment of the 
present incumbent, Doctor Liutner. We are glad that 
this, which may be made one of the most important 
scientific positions in the country, is thus secured to a 
competent naturalist, and kept out of the hands of 
semi-scientific pretenders. 
The Farmer of the Future.— Prof. Wright- 
son, in his inaugural lecture before the students of the 
Wilts and Hants Agricultural College, at Downton, near 
Salisbury (England) said, among other things, that: “The 
farmer of the future must then be a man of resource; 
he must be ready to adapt himself to new circumstances 
and to adopt new crops when he finds he is undersold. 
He must look upon the soil and air as his agents for the 
production of animal and vegetable forms, the precise 
type of which must depend upon the laws of supply and 
demand. If an ironmonger finds that he has a strong 
competitor in the sale of locks, he turns his attention to 
lamps or to something else, and so must the farmer.” 
Sundry Humbugs, 
In these days of sum¬ 
mer showers and 
storms, accompanied 
by lightning and thun¬ 
der, there cometh the 
Lightning-Rod Man. 
Other humbugs come 
and go; other frauds 
become known and 
cease to be profitable, 
but the Lightning-rod 
swindle is perennial. People are 
most easily humbugged in mat¬ 
ters about which they know least; 
there is scarcely any thing—if we 
may call it a thing — of which 
there is so little accurate popular 
knowledge, as electricity. It is 
true that to the best informed there is much about elec¬ 
tricity that is obscure, but its important facts and laws 
may be easily understood, and it is a great pity that they 
are not generally known. A lack of this knowledge in 
the community allows various electrical humbugs to suc¬ 
ceed, from the ridiculous little so-called Batteries we re¬ 
cently exposed, up to the ubiquitous lightning-rod man. 
THE LIGHTNING-ROD SWINDLE 
has two principal features. The lack of a knowledge of 
a few simple facts in electricity, allows the so-called 
agent to make people believe that safety lies only in 
using his particular style of rod—usually some outlandish 
“ doubled and twisted” much insulated and variously be- 
pointed affair that makes a house look somewhat like a 
gigantic hatchel, if one is so unfortunate as to allow the 
thing to be put up. The other feature is, that it is usual¬ 
ly made the medium of some form of down-right fraud. 
Fraud in the price, in the measurement, in getting the 
victim under some pretence to sign a bogus note; frauds 
which, we are sorry to say, are by no means confined to 
lightning-rod men, but very often practised by them. 
These fellows are masters of their art; their 
KNOWLEDGE OF HUMAN NATURE 
is so acute, their powers of illustration sogreat., and their 
glibness of tongue so remarkable, that one can not 
help wishing that their talents were exercised in some 
honest calling. With the majority of people, their only 
safety is in not listening to these chaps. If allowed to 
I tell their story, they will convince most persons that they 
live in imminent danger; if the house has safely stood 
for 50 years without a lightning-rod, they can prove that 
the danger is all the greater; they can prove that a rod 
is needed then and there, and that the only rod that can 
possibly protect a house is the particular rod for which 
An allowance may be made for the old rod—which will 
straightway become a good one to be put up somewhere 
else! These chaps consider themselves in luck if on 
their first visit the man of the house is away, and they 
can operate upon the fears of the women. The various 
forms of swindling in measurement, etc., can as a gen¬ 
eral thing only be practised if the fellows arc engaged to 
“ rod the house,” and our advice is to avoid these by 
having nothing to do with these travelling agents or their 
wares ...But what shall those who fear danger from 
lightning do ? it will be asked. We present some sugges¬ 
tions to meet the case in an article given elsewhere_ 
As the so-called medical batteries profess to deal with 
LIGHTNING IN ANOTHER FORM, 
we may say, as not foreign to the subject, that the 
battery business seems to be on the wane, only one 
new one having come before us since we last noticed 
them. Such a thing could not last long, it having no real 
value. Were the simplest laws of electricity generally 
known, these so-called batteries could deceive no one, as 
a glance at them would show them to be utterly worthless 
as generators of electricity. 
THAT SECRET SERVICE SHOP 
at Cincinnati seems to have found business dull and in 
order to get its name before the public instituted a mur¬ 
der—on paper. Indeed so quiet had it been for a few 
months, that we had nearly forgotten it, but the Texas 
papers and a letter from an indignant reader in Texas, 
brought them to mind again. The “ Galveston Daily 
News” published with the neat and taking little title of 
“A Hellish Crime,” a telegraphic dispatch from Dallas, 
giving the story that two women disguised as men had 
cut the throat of a farmer’s wife and that the women 
aforesaid were shot dead by a stranger. The dispatch 
took pains to state that the information was derived 
from the special agent of the Cincinnati Secret Service 
Shop. Two days later the “ News ” announced that the 
story was “ untrue in every allegation and particular.” 
Our correspondents feels justly indignant that these 
“ Cincinnati frauds,” in order to secure notoriety, by 
making it appear that their detectives discovered this re¬ 
markable crime, should select Texas as the scene of the 
exploit, though he regards it as a shrewd advertising 
dodge. Knowing that the “ Hellish Crime ” will be 
widely copied, while its denial will not be, and as one 
who has the interests of the State at heart he sharply 
protests against the course of the Secret Servicables. 
It has been before stated that the most annoying cases, 
we have to deal with are those in which we feel quite 
sure a scheme is a humbug, but have not the proofs to 
enable us to say so. As an illustration of this, and 
also as a sample of what is a frequent occurrence in our 
office, we give our experience with 
“THE CHICHESTER RIFLE” 
which was recently advertised very largely through 
the country. As there are a number of better class jour¬ 
nals which consider the admission of an advertisement in 
the American Agriculturist as a proof of its being worthy 
of a place in their columns, extraordinary efforts are 
often put forth to get such advertisements into our col¬ 
umns. Perhaps on this account, the “ Chichester Rifle 
Company ” made an offer of a liberal cash contract for 
their advertisement in this paper, amounting to several 
hundreds of dollars (to run to $1,000 or more we believe) 
To get around our well known strict rules, the guarantee 
of $10,000 from a well known responsible party was 
offered ns that the said Company would do by our readers 
“just what their advertisement promised.” The gen¬ 
tlemen in charge of our business columns, as in duty 
bound, and according to custom, submitted the matter to 
the Editor. It seemed to be “all on the square,” but to 
be certain, we sent for one of the “ $4.50 rifles.” On ex¬ 
amination it proved to be a pretty good revolver, a 7- 
shooter, of 22 / J00 calibre (ball about the size of small 
buckshot). Bnt the barrel was extended to 16 inches, 
with good sights, and a wooden, removable shoulder piece 
was attached to the breech for holding it steady. Well, 
here was a small repeating rifle, that would not be very 
dear at $4.50 to any one wishing such a weapon for shoot¬ 
ing at a target at short range, for killing rats, perhaps 
squirrels and other small game, at near distances. With 
such a “guarantee” should we not insert the advertise- | 
ment? We first said yes, but on examining the large, 
page-wide advertisement, there was a lively and striking 
scene, well calculated to attract general attention. There j 
was a combined prairie, mountain and forest panorama, I 
with deer and other large animals scattered round, 
some alive and others shot down, and there were the 
hunters with their $4.50 rifles doing it, while in 
the foreground stood out in large figures “ $4.50.” 
