274 
AMEEICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
pickle the enemy. Let him call the birds to 
his aid, build shelters for them in his fruit trees, 
and while they sing jubilant songs over the 
slain, let all the people say, Amen ! 
REVIEW OF BOOKS. 
TaLpa; or the Chronicles of a Clay ’Farm. An Agricul¬ 
tural Fragment, by C. W. H. With an Introduction and 
Notes, by Lewis F. Allen. Danforth, Hawley, & Co.: Buf¬ 
falo. Price — cts. 
Portions of the above work made its appear¬ 
ance several years since from week to week, in 
the London Gardener's Chronicle , and we well 
recollect the delight that the perusal of them 
gave us at the time, and the high opinion we 
formed of the unknown writer. For humor 
combined with good sense, shrewd observation, 
enlightened views, kindliness towards the hum¬ 
ble, poor, and ignorant, and keen satire upon 
the dog-in-the-manger management of some few 
large, and still larger-desiring land-owners of 
Great Britain, this little work has no equal, or 
indeed a fellow. 
From a few hints dropped here and there in 
his book, we infer that the author had obtained 
some little practical or theoretical knowledge of 
agriculture in early life, probably during vaca¬ 
tion from school; that he graduated at one of the 
universities, studied law, practised a short while, 
fell into ill health, made a long voyage to some 
distant country—India we presume—found the 
climate too hot and dry for him—did not like it— 
returned home—suddenly found himself in pos. 
session of “ two hundred and fifty statute acres,” 
comprising one of the stiffest, wettest, and most 
unproductive clay farms of Old England, which 
its last tenant had abandoned cultivating in des¬ 
pair, as no longer enabling him to pay rent, or 
holding out the least hope of its ever being able 
to do so. With these “antecedents,” (as the 
word now-a-days is,) and under thes z flattering 
auspices, our author undertook the manage¬ 
ment of the farm himself, confessing to no 
more bookish or practical knowledge than his 
early classical studies in the the Georgies of 
Virgil, and a later intimacy with Cobbett’s edi¬ 
tion of Tull’s works, and the brace of volumes of 
British Husbandry by the Society for the Diffu¬ 
sion of Useful Knowledge, the two latter forced 
upon him to read and re-read, on a long nine- 
month’s voyage at sea, because he had no 
other book on board-ship to distract his ennui. 
With such preparation, but armed and equiped, 
as we suspect, with a strong, determinate will, 
he suddenly finds himself, one dreary November 
day, in a year which he chooses to distinguish 
with a blank, all alone, in the full possession and 
enjoyment of his clay-cold farm of “two hun¬ 
dred and fifty statute acreshis only neighbors 
a set of deeply prejudiced in-th ^-old-system 
land-holders; his only companions some mathe¬ 
matical looking instruments, and a well-selected 
library of agricultural books he had the good 
sense to take to his solitude with him ; and his 
only visitors the best agricultural periodicals of 
the day, which he had the still further good 
sense to subscribe for before leaving London. 
All at once “ the arrival of load after load of 
draining tiles, gave parish notice of the attempt 
to drain what antiquity”—in other words, preju¬ 
dice, obstinacy, and stupidity—“had pronounced 
undrainable since the deluge.” With this pre¬ 
fatory remark, our author then proceeds: 
But why can’t it bo drained ? asked Green¬ 
horns. 
Because there is no fall! replied Collective 
Wisdom. 
Has it ever been tried with a spirit-level? 
Now this was not a fair question. Spirit-levels 
(if they had any meaning or existence at all) 
were unintelligible, mathematical-looking instru¬ 
ments of purely professional nature, only seen, 
if ever, in the hands of road-surveyors’ assist¬ 
ants and people of that sort. They had nothing 
whatever to do with farming. The question was 
unfair; it contained an ambiguous term. 
Picture to yourself, however, the following 
conclusion from it. A bleak, foggy, November 
day; a long rambling space, marsh or meadow, 
as you might choose to call it, of some twenty 
acres in extent, and about the third part of a 
mile in length, with a narrow, thick plantation 
of rushes, sedges, and brook-lime, and such 
aquatic vegetation, threading its way in one long 
dank line from end to end, by such fantastic 
meanderings, that it looked as if the hidden 
channel of choked moisture it concealed had 
been making a continued series of experiments 
from time out of mind in search of an outlet; 
and after centuries of struggle and disappoint¬ 
ment, had at length arrived, quite by accident, 
at a certain point at one end of the meadow, 
where you might see a pair of high mud boots 
standing, or rather soaking, with a man in them 
[meaning himself] peering through a telescope 
on three legs, as if he was watching for the to¬ 
tal eclipse of a small boy that is to be seen, 
gradually sinking, about fifty yards off", and 
clutching in his agony a high staff by his side, 
figured as if for high and low water mark. 
Presently the boots and the telescope, after 
various ineffectual efforts and heavings, succeed 
in striking their quarters; the boy after sundry 
spasmodic struggles, to correspond, achieves the 
same exploit; and the same scene as before 
occurs again some fifty yards further on, and 
again and again, at the same intervals, until they 
reach the other end of the meadow, and come 
plump upon the bands of a marshy pool some 
six acres in extent. On attaining this point, the 
telescope is suddenly shut up with a triumphant 
snap; its three legs jump into one; the drip¬ 
ping, shivering boy receives a tremendous, 
involuntary thwack on the back, and a Fall of 
Nine Feet is declared, like a “dividend of ten 
per cent., and a balance over to go on with!” 
Oh you primeval carp, pike, and eels! You 
little thought, on that day, how deadly a fishing- 
rod, marked and measured inch by inch, threw its 
shadow across your ancient domain; little did 
your believed security dream of so new a mon¬ 
ster, the angler upon three legs, that had mea¬ 
sured the altitude of your downfall, and caught 
you all, if not upon one, upon tioo cross hairs. 
Old fish or a new farm ? Snipes or Swede- 
turnips? Which was it to be? There stood 
but this question between the will and the way 
to let the dry land appear. And who knows 
what Saurian monstrosities of a primeval age 
might be brought into daylight when this stag¬ 
nation of waters was let loose, which had 
dammed up the moisture of so many broad acres 
from time immemorial ? since little raised above 
the high-water mark of this pool, lay the sub¬ 
soil of the whole farm beyond and around it; 
and the lowest point of this meadow was the 
lowest point of all. 
[Note by the American Editor.] 
[A better illustration could not be given of 
the condition of innumerable tracts of low land 
interspersed throughout the cultivated districts 
of the United States. They may be found con¬ 
taining from five, to five hundred acres, and up¬ 
ward, and presenting to the eye all degrees of 
barrenness and pestilence, from the marsh, 
yielding coarse grass and shrub alders, to the 
bottomless morass dotted with pools of slimy, 
green, stagnant waters, inhabited by obscene 
reptiles. So that a sufficient fall can be obtain¬ 
ed for the passage of superabundant water off 
on to a lower level, no obstacle need lie in the 
way of reclaiming any extent of such wastes into 
the most desirable soils imaginable. Agricultural | 
engineering was the inductive science applied to 
this experiment of our author; and this is a pro¬ 
fession unfortunately too little understood and 
practised by the farmer. When that is made a 
profession by itself in this country, as it in time 
will be, we may expect a thorough exploration, 
and a consequent reclamation of the unsightly 
swamps which now so often disfigure the other¬ 
wise agreeable face of some of our best agricul¬ 
tural districts.] 
The first of his trials and troubles of farming 
are thus humorously described. It seems he 
had told his head-drainer, after taking his levels, 
to dig the drains and lay the tile three feet deep, 
although practice and science have since shown 
that four feet would have been better. But the 
oldest inhabitant of that region had never 
thought or dreamed of a drain over one foot or 
eighteen inches deep; and as the head-man 
employed by our green and boobish farmer, as¬ 
serted that he had “ been a draining this forty 
year and more, and ought to know summut 
about it,” in the absence of his principal, he pro¬ 
ceeds according to his own notion of the fitness 
of things. As soon as this is ascertained, the 
following brief and characteristic dialogue ensues 
between Mr. Head-Drainer, and Mr. Owner-of- 
the-Clay-Farm: 
“But I must have it three feet deep !” 
“ Oh it’s no use : it’ll never drain so deep as 
that through this here clay !” 
“ But I tell you it must be 1 There can be no 
fall without it.” 
“Well, I’ve been a draining this forty year, 
and I ought to know summut about it.” 
From that moment I date my experience in 
the trials and troubles of farming; at that in¬ 
stant my eyes began to open to the true mean¬ 
ing of those “practical difficulties” which the 
uninitiated laugh at because they have never 
encountered them ; and which the man of science 
despises who has said to steam, water, and ma¬ 
chinery, “ do this,” and they do it, but has 
never known what it is to try and guide out of 
the old track, a mind that has run in the same 
rut “this forty year and more.” 
Of the kind, considerate, and comic manner 
that our author took to convince his head-man 
that he was wrong, and get him to acknowledge, 
“Well, I don’t know but what you’re right, sir,” 
we shall leave the reader to find out for himself 
at pages 41 and 42 of the work under review, 
and pass to his description of Crossbill's Clod 
Crusher, an implement that is just begun to be 
manufactured in our own country, and which 
we cannot too highly recommend to the culti¬ 
vators of stiff clay soils: 
Plowing, scuffling, and leveling were the or¬ 
der of the day, to the great scandal of the high 
ridges and their admirers; but on the ponderous 
and august entry of the clod-crusher, (a new 
monster in those days,) the first mentioned half 
of &the field took leave of the other, and as 
each clod yielded up its individuality under the 
potent arguments of that most persuasive of in¬ 
struments, the modern fallow went ahead of the 
ancient, and old Jethro Tull himself would have 
envied me the delight of seeing the work of com¬ 
minution and perfect intermixture which its 
magic transit left behind it. Never was there 
such a sagacious or relentless old tyrant in deal¬ 
ing with a clod, as this same Crossbill, for so it 
shall be named, and right deservedly. If he 
can’t crush it with his elephant foot, he takes it 
up secundum artem, as a mastiff would a bone, 
and gives it a squeeze with his iron teeth; and 
if that won’t do, why then like a bull he tosses 
it over, and gores it with the next revolution. 
Clever must be the lump that, after one or two 
such embraces, escapes with its integrity less 
broken than to the exemplar of a handful of 
walnuts. 
