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AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
SHORT HORN vs, ALL OTHER CATTLE 
Wm. Creasor, a Butcher of New-port 
Market, recently wrote to the editor of the 
Mark-Lane Express as follows : 
The Short Horn or Durham cattle are not 
only spreading over every country in Eng¬ 
land, but Ireland; and the Long Horns will 
soon become extinct both in England and 
Ireland. There are many first-rate Durhams 
to be found in Scotland, and many fine 
Short Horns have crossed the Atlantic 
Ocean, and will soon spread all over the 
globe. They are a large size at an early 
maturity. In England, the cows and heifers 
are worth more than any other kind for the 
milkman in the metropolis and other towns. 
It is rare that you see a Hereford, Devon, or 
Long Horned cow among the milkmen in 
London. The best Durham oxen have thick, 
wide, fat backs, with a handsome frame, and 
plenty of lean flesh, with heavy thighs, and 
generally, when made fat, weigh all the 
weights they are laid at; they are longer 
than thegenerality of Herefords and Devons, 
and a great many Short Horns are as large 
and as heavy at three years old as the Dev¬ 
ons and Herefords are at four. They car¬ 
ry plenty of tallow according to age, and the 
best of them have a fine silky grain, with 
marbled flesh. I find no beast come to the 
scale better, with the exception of the thick¬ 
est, lean-fleshed, short-legged, polled Scots ; 
and 1 have purchased many half-hreds be¬ 
tween the best polled Scots and the Durhams 
fed in Scotland ; these half-bred bullocks 
weigh exceedingly well accotding to size— 
no beast better. The Herefords have beau¬ 
tiful, fine-grained, marbled flesh ; but many 
of them are light in their thighs and lean 
flesh, and deceive the butchers in weight, 
especially when they are patchy with pom¬ 
mels of fat flesh without, and but little tal¬ 
low within. I consider the Durham cattle, 
take them all in all, are the best breed for the 
farmer or breeder for profit; and Sir Charles 
Knightley’s Durham oxen, when cut up, are 
as good flesh as the best Hereford, and are 
worth as much per pound. When I speak 
of Durhams, 1 do not mean coarse Short 
Horns. 
BUCKWHEAT. 
Few crops can be turned to better ac¬ 
count on a poor, light, gravelly soil, than 
buckwheat. It possesses a chemical action 
on the soil, by which the coarser particles 
are disintegrated or rendered finer, and the 
soil is thereby improved. Pure, inorganic 
earth—that is, carthun mixed with animal or 
vegetable matter—is produced by the disin¬ 
tegration or pulverizing of rocks. Silex or 
s nd is the oxide or rust of silicium ; or, to 
make it more familiar, it is pulverized quartz. 
Clay is produced by the decomposiiion of 
feldspar. Now all the quartz and feldspar in 
the world, while existing in the form of rock, 
will not produce a blade of grass ; it is only 
when decomposed or pulverized ; and the 
finer the particles, the belter the soil. 
If a soil, then, is coarse, the object of the 
farmer is to pulverize it, which can only be 
done by some chemical application, or the 
growing of some crop which has this chemi¬ 
cal power. Buckwheat, by a processyet un¬ 
discovered, has that power, and the longer it 
is cultivated, on a given piece of ground, the 
finer will be the particles of the soil. It in¬ 
jures land for corn, but leaves it in fine order 
for potatoes, and is the best crop to kill out 
bushes, wild grass, and mellow greensward. 
To fit the land for the next succeeding crop, 
in rotation, plow in a crop of buckwheat in 
blossom. 
As food for man, except in small quantities 
we could not recommend it, as cakes made 
from it, though light when hot, are heavy as 
cold liver when cold. A constant use of it 
has a tendency, also, to produce cutaneous 
diseases; but, boiled with potatoes, apples or 
pumpkins, it is first rate for hogs. When 
ground, it is excellent for milk cows. Fed 
raw, or left standing in the field, it is great 
for shanghais, (they being allowed to harvest 
for themselves.) The blossoms afford ma¬ 
terial for the very best honey, and^at a sea¬ 
son of the year when other flowers are gone. 
It should never be given in any form to 
horses, as it bloats them rather than fattens; 
and what appears to be fat, put on a horse 
by buckwheat in a week, will disappear by 
hard work in a day .—Ohio Farmer. 
USE OF OPIUM, 
Opium eating and laudanum drinking, as 
evils of great magnitude, are attracting some 
attention. A recent writer in the New-York 
Evening Post presents a deplorable picture 
of the case of a friend who is a slave to the 
habit. The picture is not overdrawn; we 
have been personally acquainted with cases 
equally unfortunate. One nowin our mind, 
is that of the wife of a physician in Ohio, a 
lady of intelligence and high respectability, 
who is a victim of this unfortunate “disease.” 
So completely is she the slave of the ap¬ 
petite that, while in all else she is the very 
soul of honor and truthfulness, she hesitans 
not to the grossest deception to procure regu¬ 
lar supplies of the drug. She resorts to 
every possible artifice, will importune friends, 
bribe servants, fabricate stories of some¬ 
body’s illness, and herself make long jour¬ 
neys. and leave no means untried to procure 
it. 
For a time she fed her appetite, unknown 
to her husband. When he learned the fear¬ 
ful truth, he tried to arrest her fatal career, 
but neither argument, persuasion, manage¬ 
ment or commands would restrain her, and 
he now quietly permits her to procure and 
make use of the vile drug. 
She was once a brilliant ornament of the 
large society in which she moved—now a 
source of inexpressible mortification and 
pain to her husband and family. 
When under the influence of the narcotie, 
she is sociable in the extreme, and a veiy 
pleasing companion ; but when deprived of 
her now daily portion, she is lifeless and inef¬ 
ficient, careless of all that surrounds her 
and indifferent to her children. The use of 
opium, in its various forms, has made a per¬ 
fect wreck of a lovely woman, the mother of 
an interesting family, and reduced her to the 
level of the drunkard. 
Tliie evil is growing fearfully. What 
remedy can be proposed, we know not. 
Those who have become habituated to its 
use have not the power to break off, no mat¬ 
ter how high an order of talent they may pos¬ 
sess. The case of the unfortunate De- 
Quincey is a striking proof of this fact. 
All that can be done then is to guard care¬ 
fully the rising generation, and prevent the 
spread of the evil, which, if as general, 
would be ten-fold worse than that of intem¬ 
perance. 
Toads.— A correspondent of the Cam¬ 
bridge (Mass.) Chronicle puts in a plea for 
toads, aud justifies his partiality by the fol¬ 
lowing, which we extract from his communi¬ 
cation : 
“ We have in our garden a small nursery 
of plum trees, which have been nearly de¬ 
stroyed by the canker worms. Last season 
we commenced shaking them off. One day 
we observed many toads about these trees, 
that on our approach became fr'ghtened and 
retreated in great haste to their retreats in 
the neighboring bushes. Soon finding that 
they were not pursued, they commenced 
hopping back, and caught with avidity each 
canker worm, as it descended on its tiny 
thread. We counted at one time thirty im¬ 
mediately round our feet. Day after day 
we fed them with their favorite food, and 
they became so tame as to follow us, watch 
our hand, and take the worm from our fin¬ 
gers.” 
This is new to us. though it may not be to 
many of our readers ; but whatever taste the 
toad may have for canker worms, we are 
quite sure that it does a world of good in a 
garden, by destroying earth worms, of whirh 
it eats large numbers. We once tried to 
surfeit a toad with earth worms, but our pa¬ 
tience was appeased, and we have always 
held that to destroy one of those disgusting 
looking reptiles was doing one’s grounds a 
deal of injury. There is no charge brought 
against the toad but its disagreeable appear¬ 
ance, and it might well quote the old saw to 
those who despise it without seeking to leain 
its real value—looks are nothing, behavior 
is all. 
Wetting Bricks —As it is important that 
every one engaged in building should be well 
informed in regard to the durability of ma¬ 
terials, we publish the following from an ex¬ 
change paper: 
Very few people, or even builders, are 
aware of the advantage of wetting bricks 
before laying them, or if they are aware of 
it, they do not practice it; for of the many 
houses now in progress in this city, there 
are very few in which wet bricks are used. 
A wall twelve inches thick, built of good 
mortar with bricks well soaked, is stronger 
in every respect than one sixteen inches 
thick built dry. The reason of this is, that 
if the bricks are saturated with water, they 
will not abstract from the mortar the moist¬ 
ure which is necessary to itschrystalization; 
and on the contrary, they will unite chemi¬ 
cally with the mortar, and b come as solid as 
a rock. On the other hand, if the bricks are 
put up dry, they immediately take all tl e 
moisture from the mortar, leaving it too diy 
to harden, and the consequence is, that when 
a building of this description is taken down 
or tumbles down of its own accord, tl e 
mortar from it is like so much sand.— Scien¬ 
tific American. 
An Anecdote with a Moral.—A friend 
not long since told us a story in relation to 
one of our subscribers, which contained a 
good moral for husbands, and also furnishes 
an example for wives which is not unworthy 
of imitation under similar circumstances: 
The subscriber referred to, said to our 
friend in the presence of his wife, that it had 
been his intention to call at the Down Easter 
office, pay up his arrearages, and discontinue 
his paper. His wife promptly asked, 
“ Why do you wish to discontinue the 
paper?” 
“ Because,” said the husband, “ I am so 
much away from home on other business, 
and I have so little lime to read, there seems 
to be very little use in my taking the paper.” 
“ Yes,” responded his wife, “ it may be of 
little use to you, but it is of great use to me. 
1 remain at home while you are gone and I 
wish to know what is going on in the world. 
If you discontinue' the paper, I will go 
straight to town and subscribe myself.” 
As the paper has not been discontinued, we 
suppose the wife’s reasoning was conclusive. 
The moral of this incident must not be 
overlooked. A husband should consider the 
gratification and profit afforded to his wife 
and children by the paper, as well as his 
own, and not discontinue the paper simply 
pecausc he may not have an opportunity to 
read it regularly. And, further, it may re¬ 
mind some good husbands, not now sub¬ 
scribers, that, it is their duty to take the 
