674 
SEPT i9 
Who Is My Landlord? 
C. E. C., Tompkins County, N. Y.— 
“Owner and Tenant’' In a late RURAL 
teaches a lesson which should be heeded by 
many of my neighbors. What better than 
a “ tenant” are you if even though an 
owner you make every effort to sell as 
much as possible from the farm, without 
any regard to Its loss of fertility. You may 
regard it as your home, plant a few trees 
and fix up the buildings with the extra 
money obtained, but by constantly drain¬ 
ing the place of its fertility, you lessen the 
income until mortgage payments cannot 
be met. There are several farms in sight 
of my home, that in the last 10 years have 
retrograded enough to seriously affect their 
market value by reason of continual “skim- 
miDg” by their owners. Now efforts are 
being made to repair the damage and “ it’s 
going to cost me dear, too,” said one of 
them. Several of my acquaintances rented 
farms, and calculated to get just as much 
of the land’s fertility into their pockets as 
practicable in the shortest possible time. 
Short-sighted owners aided them in making 
in the contract no restrictions as to crops 
or sales. Some of these shrewd tenants 
took the stored fertility of one farm and 
paid for another with it. From the day 
they took possession of their new purchased 
homes their practice changed and instead of 
seeking for every dollar they could find 
they began to look for every chance to im¬ 
prove the quality of their purchase. “ You 
are not selling as much hay as when you 
were on Lane’s farm,” said I to one of 
them. “ No i What’s money in one place, 
ain’t in another. It depends on who owns 
the land,” said he. This fact is becoming 
so evident that many landlords are adopt¬ 
ing the system spoken of by Dr. T. H. Hos¬ 
kins in a late Rural limiting the sale of 
all products and requiring the tenant to 
conform to a prescribed rotation, which 
shall not impoverish the soil. This does 
not please the renter and he will not pay 
as much rent as before. The agricultural 
papers and colleges and also theexperiment 
stations are gradually convincing both 
renters and owners of the wisdom and gain 
to both of a wise rotation. 
Learn How to Make Fewer Mistakes. 
T. H. Hoskins, Orleans County, Ver¬ 
mont.— President Smith, of Wisconsin, 
says (page 573): “ I wish to impress it upon 
the minds of your readers that Nature ac¬ 
cepts no excuses for our mistakesand, 
just below, a Michigan subscriber declares 
that, since he attended the State agricult¬ 
ural college, he “can be satisfied with 
nothing unscientific on the farm; ” and 
adds that “conducted on practical busi¬ 
ness principles farming will pay far better 
than the majority of professional or mer¬ 
cantile undertakings.” At the same time 
we are hearing, all over the country, that 
“ farming don’t pay 1 ” 
Putting these things together, it would 
appear as a most necessary thing at this 
time, for the promotion of agriculture, that 
those engaged in it should make fewer mis¬ 
takes ; and that the way to avoid mistakes 
is to learn more about the business we are 
attempting. The average annual produc¬ 
tion of American acres in farm crops is 
shown by census statistics not to be in¬ 
creasing, even in the best States. This 
would indicate that if knowledge of agri¬ 
culture is advancing, it advances no faster 
than the decline of native fertility in con¬ 
sequence of ignorant or reckless farming. 
Now, what is the most promising remedy 
for such a dangerous situation ? Emer¬ 
son’s allegation, “ that every man i3 as lazy 
as he dares to be,” seems justified by the 
agricultural situation as so many farmers 
report it. As long as they could farm, 
and get on tolerably, by drawing on the 
riches of fresh land, stored with the accu¬ 
mulated resources of Nature, they were too 
lazy to learn anything more of their busi¬ 
ness than the manual operations of plant¬ 
ing and harvesting. The agriculture of 
America has so far been mainly a process 
of land robbery which has now reached 
nearly to the limits of possibility, so far as 
getting a living by it is concerned. 
It seems pretty plain that but a very 
small proportion of the present number of 
our farmers are going to improve in 
knowledge and skill much faster than here¬ 
tofore. Agricultural journals and farmers’ 
institutes reach a certain number among 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
us, and have some good effect upon our 
farming ; but he must be a very sanguine 
person who can hope to see Ameri¬ 
can farming efficiently reformed by 
these instrumentalities alone. The men 
who most need instruction, the great ma¬ 
jority of our farmers, are neither reading 
nor Institute attending men. Those who 
might most profit by those helps are most 
indifferent to, or most incapable of appre¬ 
ciating them. 
As to what may be accomplished by gov¬ 
ernmental aid, there is no doubt that a re¬ 
modeling of our public schools, with a view 
to more practical and business-promoting 
courses of instruction is demanded ; but so 
long as the teachers of our schools are 
themselves schooled after the old fashion, 
and s. long as the literary college gives the 
tone to all thought in regard to popular 
instruction, hope in this direction must be 
very remote. If our so-called agricultural 
colleges could be turned into normal col¬ 
leges for the preparation of teachers of both 
sexes for our rural schools, teachers well 
grounded in the natural sciences, in their 
practical bearings upon the industries of 
the country, there would be a much more 
hopeful outlook. But who expects to see 
that ? 
It seems to me that the present declen¬ 
sion of our agriculture, consequent upon 
the badness of our farming, can be arrested 
only by the forced abandonment of the 
poorer farms all over the country, up to a 
point where even our present ignorant and 
slip-shod ways will pay, in consequence of 
a shortage of tood. This will tend to bring 
capital and skill upon the land as their 
most remunerative opportunity; and, 
secondarily, as opening a career for prop¬ 
erly trained young men, it will at last 
react upon tne conservative fossillsm of 
those of our educational institutions which 
may find no demand for their antiquated 
learning. 
Rural Mail Delivery. 
L. H., Dansville, N. Y.—The editorial 
on page 612 advocating free delivery out¬ 
side of cities, strikes a need that farmers 
especially should demand to have relieved. 
One of the worst features of country life 
is the lack of mail facilities. Groceries, 
fresh meat, etc., are delivered at the door 
as cheaply as they can be bought at the 
store; but in order to get the papers and 
letters we so much wish to receive, a trip 
varying in length according to our dis¬ 
tance from the post office, is necessitated. 
A delivery twice weekly would be a great 
boon, and it could be extended from that, 
as the system became perfected; for when 
once established there would be no going 
back. I live six miles from my post office 
and am dependent for the delivery of the 
mail, which is large, on a trip made either 
by myself or a near neighbor to the offic3. 
During the busy season of the year it is 
obtained very irregularly, being some¬ 
times not received for two weeks. One per¬ 
son could deliver it twice weekly in this 
town which contains 30,000. People residing 
on by-roads could have their mail left at 
their nearest neighbor’s on the mail route. 
The cost would be a small item when we con¬ 
sider the benefit it would confer on so large 
a class of our citizens as compared with 
the vast sums squandered, from which the 
people receive no benefit. There cannot be 
any satisfactory reason why the United 
States with its intelligent reading class of 
country residents should be so far behind 
England in this matter. 
Wilsons Will Soon Starve Us! 
C. E. Chapman, Tompkins County, N. 
Y.—J. M. Smith says on page 608: “ Tne 
only variety that even threatened to super¬ 
sede the Wilson Strawberry is the Manches¬ 
ter.” The Manchester is almost worthless 
here. It is a poor bearer and soft. When 
one does get a few, there is a “ stick in the 
end,” after the first picking and it is of 
poor flavor. One would “ starve to death” 
growing Wilsons here, and I don’t believe 
one plant would be set next spring, in this 
whole county, if it were not used for fertil¬ 
izing the Crescent. Nine-tenths of all our 
berries are Crescents, and they are coming 
more into favor every year; these statements 
seem to conflict, but do not. 
The Action of Soil Moisture. 
G. A. P., Bradford County, Pa.—I n 
The Rural of August 29, J. W. I., seems 
to doubt that capillary attraction is the 
cause of soil moisture. Though neither a 
“ college professor” nor an “ agricultural 
editor,” I would like to give my idea of the 
matter. Accepting the definition that cap¬ 
illary attraction is “nothing more than 
the ordinary attraction of the particles of 
matter for each other,” let us consider why 
it is that water sinks into the earth and 
again returns to the surface. 
Iron filings are attracted by a magnet, 
yet, if we thrust a magnet into a box filled 
with them, we find that only a small portion 
of them adhere to it. Its attractive force is 
limited and this is true of all substances. 
Take a lump of dry earth and slowly apply 
water to it. It matters not whether the 
water be applied to the top, bottom, or 
sides of the lump, the result is the same; 
it will attract and hold the water until it Is 
thoroughly saturated, when, if more water 
is applied it will drop from the bottom of 
the lump, drawn down by the force of grav¬ 
ity, which is the name applied to the at¬ 
tractive force of matter only when it tends 
to draw bodies toward the center of the 
earth. 
[That is a pretty fair definition of terres¬ 
trial gravity or gravitation; but in general 
physics gravity is the tendency of all bodies 
towards each other or towards a center of 
attraction. To It are undoubtedly due the 
motions and perturbations of all the plan¬ 
ets. Indeed the most marvelous proof of 
the truth of Newton’s great discovery is 
afforded by the discovery of Neptune, the 
most distant known planet, whose mean 
distance is 2,745,998,000 miles from the sun. 
After a quarter of a century’s watch of 
Uranus, the next most distant planet, with 
a mean distance of 1,800,000,000 miles from 
the sun, it was noticed that the path pur¬ 
sue! by it in its orbit, was not strictly ac¬ 
cording to what it should be if Newton’s 
theory was correct, allowances having been 
made for the influence of Jupiter and Sat¬ 
urn on its motion. In 1821 Bouvard attri¬ 
buted these perturbations to the existence 
of an unknown outer planet, and in 1845 
Adams and Leverrier, almost simultaneous¬ 
ly, after lengthy calculations, announced 
the spot in the whole heavens where this 
unknown wanderer should at that time be 
found. Astronomers pointed their tele 
scopes into the depths of space in that 
direction and found it. Nowadays scientists 
believe in univeral gravity affecting alike 
the planetary system and stars so distant 
that their light has not yet had time to 
reach us, or is too faint ever to do so. Thus 
the influence which causes the descent of a 
tiny rain drop, affects also the motions of 
the remotest sidereal system —Eds.] 
Thus we see that, during rainfall, the 
upper layer of the soil attracts and holds 
the water to its fullest capacity, when the 
next layer in turn attracts the surplus and 
succeeding layers attract in the same man¬ 
ner until the rain ceases or an impervious 
subsoil is reached. In the latter case, the 
water accumulates, and, should the rain 
continue, fills the soil to overflowing, when 
the surplus water is either removed by the 
slope of the surface or by evaporation. 
By evaporation the surface soil loses a 
portion of its water, when the particles, 
relieved of a part of their load, again exert 
their attractive force, drawing a new sup¬ 
ply from the more heavily laden lower lay¬ 
ers, and thus it continues, the surface de¬ 
manding and the lower particles furnish¬ 
ing a new supply until, in the case of an 
(Continued on next page ) 
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Just Published. 
HOW TO RID 
Buildings and Farms 
OF 
RATS, 
Mice, Gophers, Ground Squirrels, 
Prairie Dogs, Rabbits, Moles, 
Minks, Weasels and other Pests 
quickly and safely. How to snare 
Hawks and Owls. 
Valuable Hints to Housekeep¬ 
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By “ PICKETT.” 
PRICE, 20 CENTS. 
THE RURAL PUBLISHING CO., 
Times Building, New York. 
