132 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST, 
little imperfect. The difference in the result 
of feeding rye with and without salt is in¬ 
teresting. The superior value of peas might 
be looked for, from theirj’chemical compo¬ 
sition.— Ed. 
THE BARBARISM OE THE FARM, 
“But many a crime, deemed innocent on earth, 
Is registered in heaven; and these no doubt 
Have each their record, with a curse annexed. 
Man may dismiss compassion from his heart, 
But God will never. When he charged the Jew 
To assist his foe’s down fallen beast to rise ; 
And when the bush-exploring boy that seized 
The young, to let the parent bird go free; 
Proved he not plainly, that his meaner works 
Are yet his care, and have an interest 
All in the Universal Father’s love The Task. 
We have ridden to-day five miles in a 
bleak, winter wind, the earth robed in deep 
snow and the thermometer far below the 
freezing point. W T e had cloak, over-coat 
and mittens without, and a respectable lining 
of flesh under the skin, and were very un¬ 
comfortable at that. But we saw several 
herds of cattle in this short ride, shivering 
around stack yards, their four feet drawn up 
close together, their heads to the leeward, 
and the whole animal economy struggling to 
present the smallest amount of surface pos¬ 
sible to the cutting winds. The poor brutes 
bore unmistakable evidence in their horrent 
hair, their peaked bones, thin flesh, and de¬ 
jected air, that the rails of the stack-yard 
fence had been their only shelter, and the 
icy ground their only bed, during the winter. 
We pitied the poor creatures doomed to such 
tortures, and we are unable to repress our 
indignation at their brute owners. This is 
still a fair picture of hundreds—yes, we may 
say thousands—of farms in this common¬ 
wealth. Their stock is wintered out, either 
wholly or in part, through the rains, the 
snows, and the cold of winter. 
This practice is as inhuman and barbarous 
as it is wasteful and slovenly. As we are 
fresh from these scenes of cruelty, and the 
image of the suffering kine still wounds our 
sensibilities, we mean to bear swift witness 
against it, or rather give the beasts them¬ 
selves a chance, like Balaam’s ass, to rebuke 
their stupid owners. We took notes of the 
speech of one of the philosophers of the herd 
we last past, and the burden of his eloquence 
seemed to be a reprobation of the owners of 
freezing animals, and run in this wise : 
“ Oh, ye humane and Christian citizens of 
this commonwealth, members of churches, 
patrons of missions, builders of hospitals 
and givers of alms to the poor, consider the 
poor dumb brutes of which God°'has made 
you the owners, and for whose happiness 
He will hold you responsible as for that of 
your fellow man. You can not doom us to 
the pitiless blasts of winter with impunity. 
Your hearts are touched with the woes of 
the heathen, who give their children to the 
crocodiles, but you have not even a thought 
of us, lingering in the torments of sterner 
jaws than those of the crocodile. Your 
winter blasts come down upon our quivering 
flesh and fill us with pangs, that make us 
envy the fate of the victims of the monsters 
of the Ganges. Death by the knife were a 
merciful deliverance from these slow tor¬ 
tures, administered by cold, wet and starva¬ 
tion. You pity the dumb, and build asylums 
to teach them the language of signs. You 
have no eyes to see the signs of the dumb 
that speak to you from your own stack 
yards, crying in the mute eloquence of our 
brute woe, ‘ Shelter us ; feed us ; in the 
name of Him who feeds ravens, and has 
made you the almoners of His bounty to us.’ 
“ You call us Arabs sometimes, when we 
resent the smarting injuries you inflict upon 
us. You are worse than an Arab yourselves, 
for he is faithful to his friends, and his horse 
shares with him his barley meal and his tent. 
You, Christian-men, give us the stalks, and 
keep the meal yourselves, and for shelter 
give us the canopy of the heavens and a bed 
of snow. You call us savages, in your un¬ 
reasonable anger, and second your calumny 
with your blows. You are worse than sav¬ 
ages yourselves. They do but bind their 
victim to a tree, heap around him the burn¬ 
ing pile and end his misery after a few brief 
hours. No savage ever doomed his fallen 
foe to three successive months of east winds 
sharper than needle points ; of remorseless 
cold striking pain to the very marrow of his 
bones ; of snow, sleet, and hail—God’s mes¬ 
sengers of wrath to the doomed Egyptians. 
This ingenious device for prolonging torment 
was reserved for the practice of the Christian 
men of the nineteenth century. 
“ And you practice these cruelties, not 
upon enemies who have injured you, but 
upon those whom God made your friends, 
and who, in consequence of his law, submit 
themselves to your yoke, bear your burdens, 
plow your fields, reap your harvests and 
gather them into barns. Hath he not said, 
‘Ye shall not muzzle the ox that treadeth 
out the corn.’ We not only thresh the 
grain, like the ox of Scripture, but till and 
harvest it quicker and better, and are much 
more entitled to the supply of our wants. 
But, ingrates and rebels against Heaven’s 
law that you are, you muzzle us with frost 
so that we can but half eat the miserable 
straw and stalks your parsimony deals out 
to us. 
“ It is abominable barbarism, and wretched 
economy. The unsheltered, muzzled ox has 
little strength to work, and yields expensive 
beef; the cow yields little milk, and the 
horse wastes your time in the field, and upon 
the road. If you have no humanity, treat 
us better for your purses’ sake. Build us 
barns and barn cellars, dry sheds, and cis¬ 
terns. Give us good food, and water with¬ 
out ice. Shelter saves food, saves flesh, 
saves milk, saves manure, and makes fat 
acres, fat crops, fat cattle, and a fat purse. 
Ye barbarians and sinners, shelter your 
cattle !” 
A general bellow of approbation ran thro’ 
the crowd as the horned orator descended 
from his snow bank h rostrum, and if there 
was no stamping of feet, it was because that 
intellectual method of cheering their spokes¬ 
man had not illumined their civilization. A 
half-starved yearling, with an icy cornstalk 
in one corner of his mouth, moved a vote of 
thanks. A bull, whose prowess lay more in 
his horns than in his tongue, went for print¬ 
ing the speech, and advocated reprisal upon 
the barbarians. A motherly cow, solicitous 
for her new-born calf, suggested that por¬ 
tions of the speech would be considered per¬ 
sonal and abusive, and might lead to the 
withholding of their already short supplies. 
A wag of a steer thought the Scripture- 
passages might as well be expurgated, as 
their tormentors were not very familiar with 
that book, and would not understand the 
allusion. 
We left them in the midst of the debate, 
and shall look with interest for the full re¬ 
port. The meager sketch we have given, 
we think, will furnish profitable food for re¬ 
flection at some of our rural firesides.—E d. 
CHICCORI—IS IT A BAD WEED ? 
To the Editor of the American Agriculturist: 
One page 100 I find an inquiry about chic- 
cory : “ Will some one inform me if it is a 
bad weed 1” The Chiccory, Wild Endive or 
Succory, is a syngenesius plant, a native of 
most parts of Europe, and is the Chicorium 
intybus of Linnaeus, and was first cultivated 
in England, in 1780, by Arthur Young. It 
was highly recommended by him as an herb¬ 
age plant, but he added that it was difficult 
to eradicate it when land had been once 
stocked with it. Pliny mentions a plant by 
this generic name, which was extensively 
cultivated in Egypt as a salad plant; this 
was the Chicorum endivia, which is a native 
of the East Indies, of which there are sev¬ 
eral varieties, as seen in the New-York 
markets. The Chicorium intybus grows 
with a stalk about three feet high, with 
blue flowers, the leaves somewhat resem¬ 
bling those of the Dandelion, but larger and 
more hairy. 
It was probably from the high recommend¬ 
ation given by Young, that the State of 
New-York, in their early operations to pro¬ 
mote the agricultural interests, in 1812-14, 
procured and distributed a quantity of this 
seed through western New-York. I have 
seen, within the last few years, several 
places where it was sown in small patches 
at that time, and the owners have never 
been able to eradicate it. 
In Germany and some other countries it 
is cultivated as a substitute for coffee, in 
which case it is cultivated as we do carrots 
or the vegetable oyster, and the root, which 
is the part used, very much resembles the 
latter. Mixed with coffee it imparts a pleas¬ 
ant flavor, which some would pronounce an 
improvement.—N. Goodsell, New-Haven. 
Wyandott Corn. —A correspondent at 
Stirling, Whiteside Co., Ill., says : “ I see 
advertised in some of the papers 4 Wyandott 
Corn.’ Write under, for a northern climate, 
4 Morus Multicaulis .’ I have had under cul¬ 
tivation the past season nine varieties of 
corn, but am satisfied that there are, or 
ought to be, better.” 
We hear similar accounts from others in 
reference to the failure of the Wyandott 
corn in northern climates. It is well to give 
it further limited trials, as far north as Can¬ 
ada, even—but we should not put much de¬ 
pendence upon it further north than say 38° 
or 38°, North latitude. 
