AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
0 
371 
IMPROVING MEADOWS. 
In 1811, I hired a place in the pleasant town 
of Westfield, Massachusetts, as a retreat from the 
city, and to educate my boys at the Academy 
there; and in order to afford them amusement,, 
without resorting to the street and the company 
of other boys, I took care to procure plenty of 
land and out-buildings. Besides other grounds, 
there was an old pasture of several acres, na¬ 
turally good land, but entirely worn out by 
cropping, and bore but little besides low black¬ 
berries, five-finger and sorrel. In the yard back 
of the house, I found a substance which had 
been accumulating for years, principally of rot- 
ton chips, mixed with various other substances, 
to a depth of from three inches to three feet. 
This I hauled out and spread over this pasture 
early in May, and the consequence was, an 
abundant crop of red and white clover the same 
season. 
Much has been said and written upon the 
subject of renovating worn-out grass lands by 
English farmers and English authors, and vari¬ 
ous are the materials used there for this pur¬ 
pose. England, as well as this country, has 
much land which, from nature of the soil, in 
connection with circumstances, render it neces¬ 
sary to keep them in perpetual grass, which 
makes this a subject of as much importance as 
any other, viz., the treatment of lands which 
cannot be plowed ; and top-dressing is the only 
remedy to be resorted to—hence the import¬ 
ance of a chemical analysis of the land in order 
to know what kind of material is needed, in or¬ 
der to supply the deficiency in the soil. 
I have already mentioned ashes as one effec¬ 
tual remedy in Berkshire; but whether they 
will prove equally so on all lands is a question, 
and if they should, they cannot be procured in 
sufficient quantities to supply the need. Lime 
has been recommended and used with great ef¬ 
fect, but this will only do where it is deficient 
in the land. It is well known that land over¬ 
flown by rivers is kept in perpetual fertility; 
hence muck, whenever it can be obtained, must 
prove an infallible remedy. This, however, 
cannot always be had, but where it can be had, 
it ought to be used, and I am sorry to say it is 
not. 
I know of a farm of one thousand acres of ex¬ 
cellent grass land, not a rod of which but can 
be mowed with a machine, at the rate of from 
12 to 15 acres per day; and there is swamp 
muck upon three sides of it, and some in the 
middle of it, to cover the whole farm with as 
much as would be required every year for a 
long time ; and yet there has never been a load 
of it used for this purpose; and the owner is 
racking his brain to find how he shall make the 
most of his money by speculation or otherwise, 
when he might cut 1000 tons hay per annum, 
and have pasture enough to summer a sufficient 
number of cattle to eat it all the next winter. 
But I am not about to write an essay upon 
top-dressing. I will leave it to those who have 
the material, either in their book-case or their 
heads, to enable them to do so, and will only add 
in addition, that Plaster of Paris is good for some 
land, but not for all. I have seen it applied 
with the most beneficial effect on some lands, 
and with no effect on others, and that, too, on 
the same farm ; but with well-selected materials 
fra compost heap duly prepared, there can be 
no risk or danger of loss from its application to 
any kind of soils; and it is to this that the 
farmers ought to resort for top-dressing, so far 
as materials can be found upon the farm from 
which to make a compost heap. Bones finely 
pulverized, phosphate of lime, if honestly man¬ 
ufactured, but above all, Peruvian guano, if re¬ 
sort must be had to the purchase of material, are 
good. 
I have seen upon a farm near Philadelphia, a 
rank crop of hay of the best sort growing upon 
ground lying along side of the same kind of 
land covered with weeds of the filthiest and 
rankest kind; and this difference was effected 
by a liberal application early in the spring. It 
makes one feel sad to pass over the country and 
see so much land lying waste or under a miser¬ 
able state of cultivation. I would say to the 
owners of such, sell or give away your lands, 
and go to the West, where it neither requires 
science, skill, nor much labor to get a crop. 
The pine plains east of Springfield, remain 
as they were half a century ago, not that they 
are incapable of being made productive. I was 
at that time in the habit of stopping at a public 
house on my way to Boston in the center of 
these plains, east and west, where the garden 
vegetables were as large, and the crops around 
the house as luxuriant as any other on the road, 
which I then had an opportunity of seeing by 
traveling in my own carriage, or on horseback. 
But more of this little excursion when I have 
more leisure to write. A Traveler. 
•- .*♦ - - 
ON THE USELESSNESS OF BEARING-REINS. 
We copy the following valuable and humane 
article on the check or bearing-rein, from the 
Mari Lane Express. If the writer would now 
give us a similar one on the injury of blinders 
to the bridle, he would confer a great benefit 
on the poor horse. The best broke horses we 
ever rode after, were those of Russia, particularly 
in the cities, where they do no not use either 
the check-rein, martingale, or blinders. 
It is said that when his Majesty George III., 
with a view to some improvement in military 
uniform, asked a life-guardsman, who had done 
good service in the battle of Waterloo, what sort 
of a dress he should prefer had he another sim¬ 
ilar battle to go through, he received for answer, 
“ Please your Majesty, I should prefer my shirt¬ 
sleeves.” Now, though we should be much sur¬ 
prised to see our cavalry regiment turn out for 
parade in shirt sleeve order, there can be no 
doubt the life-guardsman’s principle is a sound 
one. If a man wants to do a hard day’s work 
—if he wants to exert his muscles and sinews, 
either in walking, running, fighting, digging, 
felling trees, or carrying weights—he must have 
those muscles free and unconfined by straps, 
and ligatures, and tight clothing; no one can 
gainsay this. But how is it, then, that a prin¬ 
ciple which every one, whether a soldier or a 
sailor, farmer or laborer, would insist upon in 
his own case, should be, in England at least, to 
universally disregarded in the case of our hard¬ 
working, patient, and too often ill-used beasts of 
burthen ? How is it that the ignorance of “ com¬ 
mon things,” which Lord Ashburton so justly 
complains of, should be so lamentably conspi- 
cious in a matter so constantly before our eyes, 
in our towns, in our fields, in our crowded 
streets, in our rural lanes ; namely, our draught- 
horse appointments? It must be owned that 
one class—all honor, therefore, be to it—that 
of cab and omnibus proprietors, have set a good 
example in one respect, viz., in doing away with 
that hateful instrument of torture the bearing- 
rein, But alas! in 99 carts and wagons out of 
a 100, (carts and wagons, which are to move at 
a slow and steady space,) we still persist in crip¬ 
pling unnecessarily our motive power, and gag¬ 
ging our unhappy horses by tying up their 
heads, as if in the very tyranny of wantonness. 
On the continent the bearing-rein is rarely used, 
and then only as servile English imitation; 
but in horse-racing, hunting, hoi’se-loving Eng¬ 
land, it must be confessed its use is all but uni¬ 
versal. In Yorkshire, in the midland counties, 
in the southern, up to the steep hills near Scar¬ 
borough, as up the not less steep downs near 
Brighton, we may see heavy-laden waggons at 
all hours of the day dragged miserably along by 
horses—on one hand urged forward by ever- 
restless whipcord; on the other, as if in the veri¬ 
est spirit of contradiction, curbed in by sense¬ 
less bearing-reins; and yet, if the attendant 
carter’s attention be drawn to the unnatural 
cruelty of the proceeding, he generally appears 
fully alive to it. 
On seeing, the other day, a poor horse tug¬ 
ging away at a cart full of sand up the cliff at 
Brighton, of course with his head tied tightly to 
his back, we observed to a laborer near. What 
a shame not to undo the bearing-rein with such 
a load ! “ Oh yes, sir,” was the reply; “ I likes 
myself to see ’em free, but it’s custom, sir, cus¬ 
tom ; they thinks they looks well.” However, 
it is to be feared the truth is, thought has little 
enough to do with it; if people did think, the 
days of bearing-reins would soon be numbered. 
The folly of the practice was some years ago, 
very ably shown by Sir Francis Head, in 
his, “Bubbles by an OldMan,” where he con¬ 
trasted most unfavorably our English custom ot 
tying tightly up, with the German one of tying 
loosely down, and both with the French one of 
leaving the horses head at liberty—(and a man 
of his shrewdness and observation, a distin¬ 
guished soldier, who has galloped across the 
South American pampas, and seen there herds 
of untamed horses in all their native wildness 
and natural freedom, is no mean authority.) 
Now, he has pointed out most clearly that when 
a horse has real work to do, whether slow work, 
as in our plows and carts, or quick as, in a fast 
gallop, or in headlong flight across the plains of 
America, nature tells him not to throw his head 
up and backwards towards his tail, but forward 
and downward, so as to throw his weight into 
what he is called upon to do. This is a fact 
within every one’s observation ; we have only 
to persuade the first waggoner we see (he is sure 
to have all his horses tightly borne up) to undo 
his bearing-reins, when down will go every 
horse’s head, so as to relieve the wearisome strain 
upon his muscles, and give the weight of his 
body its due and natural power of overcoming 
resistance; and thus each horse becomes ena¬ 
bled to do his work as comfortably and easily 
as nature intended he should do; for nature 
never intended a heavy animal like a cart-horse 
to perform slow work only, or chiefly, by strain 
of muscle, but, on the contrary by the power of 
weight as the rule, assisted by strength of mus¬ 
cle as the exception, when extra resistance has 
to be overcome. 
Thus, when we cui’b up a horse’s head with 
our senseless bearing-reins, and make him as 
ewe-necked as we appear to do, we are invert¬ 
ing the rule and order of nature; we are evi¬ 
dently trying to prevent his using the full unre¬ 
strained power of his weight, and are compelling 
him to overstrain and over-exert constantly 
those very muscles which should be kept in re¬ 
serve for extra difficulties—such as greater ine¬ 
qualities in the road, new-laid stones, &c., Now 
any one can see that, to an old, worn-out, half- 
starved, over-worked animal, as too many, aye, 
by far the greater proportion, are, this must be 
intolerable cruelty. It is a mistake to think a 
a bearing-rein can be of any service whatsoever, 
unless, as a very exceptional case, to a very 
young, headstrong, unbroken horse. It is a 
mistake to think it improves a horse’s appear¬ 
ance—nothing contrary to nature can ever really 
do this; it is a mistake to think it can ever pre¬ 
vent a horse’s falling down, though it has been 
