1872.] 
131 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST, 
case. I am led to make this personal explana¬ 
tion to save the doubting Thomases the trouble 
of writing letters which it costs me valuable 
time to read. 
I have lately revived my old lecturing experi¬ 
ence, in an afternoon talk to a farmers’ meet¬ 
ing at Ogdeusburg, 1ST. Y., and I was surprised 
to note the change that has come over such 
meetings during the seventeen years that have 
passed since lecturing to farmers was my busi¬ 
ness. Then, in no matter what part of the 
country, an average farmer, no matter how in¬ 
telligent and liberal in other things, came to 
such a meeting with very much the air with 
which a dog puts liis nose to a hornet’s nest, 
doubting, but curious; afraid of what he shall 
find; and very conscious as to the impression 
he makes on those who are watching him. 
Every statement was received with suspicion, 
aud if, by good fortune, the new idea—that 
science has something to do with agriculture— 
began to dawn upon him, it was received with 
the greatest slowness aud distrust. If he were 
of the other sort—an enthusiastic believer of 
new things—he came to the meeting almost by 
stealth, and evidently dreaded the gibes aud 
jeers of the neighbors to whom he should return. 
Even so short a time ago as that of which I 
write, there were but few agricultural papers, 
aud they were struggling for a feeble subsist¬ 
ence. It was rare to find in any country neigh¬ 
borhood two men who took a purely agricultural 
paper. The Agriculturist has hundreds of sub¬ 
scribers now to one that it had then, and it was 
already an old and well-kuown paper. I was 
never treated with rudeness or incivility, but I 
was generally looked upon with undisguised 
pity—the sort of pity that is not far removed 
from contempt. But for the handful of enthu¬ 
siasts who were ready to believe all I had to 
say, and move, the position would have been 
almost unbearable. No one who lias not had 
such experience, would realize the change that 
has now taken place. During all these years 
the press has been doing its constant work, and 
I believe that in the better farming communities 
it would now be as rare to find an intelligent 
farmer who does not take or read a paper that 
is wholly or partly agricultural, as it then was 
to find one who did. It is not easy to describe 
the change that the spirit of the recent meeting 
indicated. It is precisely the change that lias 
come over the better class of farmers in their 
conversations with each other. Without be¬ 
coming less conservative they have lost their 
“old fogyism,” and have begun to realize that 
the truly conservative course is that which 
allows no opportunity for valuable improve¬ 
ment to escape. Men Avho have seen the mow¬ 
ing machine, drive to the wall the old slow- 
going, back-breaking scythe, with its gang of 
hungry mowers and their jug of sun-warmed 
grog, aud who have witnessed within a few 
years a greater revolution in the work of the 
harvest than has been effected within the same 
time in any other branch of human industry, 
have become eager for still further advances in 
their art. As a consequence, we had a meeting 
that it was a real satisfaction to attend. In the 
course of a two-hours talk, matters were intel¬ 
ligently discussed, which in the old times would 
hardly have found place in the minds of those 
present. The subject of underdraining engaged 
more attention than would have been thought 
possible, and the treatment of manure and other 
branches of farm economy attracted an earnest 
consideration, that showed how real an advance 
had been made. Indeed, we may congratulate 
ourselves that the wedge is fairly entered; that 
the minds of farmers are awakened to the im¬ 
portance of an improvement in their practices, 
and that the chief remaining obstacle to the 
rapid improvement of American agriculture lies 
less with the indifference of farmers than with 
the extravagauce, the ill-considered advice, and 
the want of judgment of those whose business 
it is to spread a knowledge of agricultural im¬ 
provement. This throws a weighty responsibility 
upon agricultural writers, who should have a 
constant watch over the soundness of their teach¬ 
ings and the avoidance of false premises. A 
better audience could not be asked than that 
which is addressed by the agricultural press, 
and if its instruction is well considered and 
wisely given, the greatest good will flow from 
its influence, while unsound advice and the en¬ 
couragement of mistaken practices will serious¬ 
ly weaken its effect. 
In my northern journey (in February), I have 
had occasion to see several herds of Ayrshire 
cattle, notably those of Mr. Morgan, of Ogdens- 
burg, and of Mr. Irving, of Montreal, from whom 
Mr. Morgan obtained bis foundation stock. The 
more I see and hear of them, the better I like 
them. They are evidently no competitors of the 
Jerseys for the butter dairy, dither in quality, or, 
as compared with the amount of food consumed, 
in quantity. But for all other purely agricul¬ 
tural uses they are evidently better. Their milk 
seems richer in caseine, aud during the flush of 
their milking their flow is much larger. They 
are docile, intelligent, aud motherly, and when 
they cease milking they take on fat very readily. 
In short, for all purposes, except butter-making, 
I believe they are the best farmer’s cows. It 
filled me with envy to see these herds so boun-. 
tifully bedded in clean straw, and to think of 
my own, in a country where the little straw that 
is grown is held at enormous prices for the 
bedding of carriage-horses, obliged to content 
themselves with beach sand, which, so far as 
comfort goes, is a poor substitute, good as it un¬ 
doubtedly is as a manure for our heavy land. 
Mr. Irving, buried in the snow of a Canadian 
winter, is no less impressive as a good farmer 
than when his.ground was open for fall work. 
His large stock is comfortably housed and cared 
for, and the accumulation of manure which was 
being hauled to the fields, ready for spring 
work, showed that he unlocks his success with 
a very large key. In some respects I thought 
that his stock showed a tendency to run too 
much to “big things.” I am not prepared to 
say, though I suspect it, that his enormous 
Clydesdale horses are less economical for work 
than our animals of more medium size; but he 
had an amount of pork on four legs that I 
should much prefer, if it were my own case, to 
put upon eight. It has a bountiful look to see 
the large Yorkshires rolling up fat to the tune 
of 700 lbs. dressed weight, but three natty Essex 
slioats, weighing 230 lbs. apiece, would be more 
to my fancy. However, it would probably be 
modest in me to confine my criticisms to men 
who have less to show than Irving has for their 
work and their wits. 
A farmer in Ashby, Mass., writes that he got 
a tin pan large enough to hold one milking from 
ten cows, but got less butter from it than he did 
from the same amount of milk in smaller pans. 
He asks whether he should have set the pan in 
water, the temperature of the air being 62* to 
65°. Certainly he should have done so. The 
great secret of successful dairying, or one of the 
great secrets, is to withdraw the animal heat 
from the milk as soon as possible. A pan^ such as 
is described, seems to me much less suitable for 
the purpose than a deep and narrow can, set to 
its neck in the water. The latter is more conven¬ 
iently skimmed and more easily handled, cools 
more rapidly, and exposes a larger proportion of 
the milk to the influence of the water and less 
to that of the air; this is better, as the tempera¬ 
ture of the water is uniform. To answer further 
questions of the same correspondent: We let 
our milk stand 24 hours (all the time in the 
water); aud we prefer to keep it lower than 62°. 
I fancy that 50° would be better, if so cold a 
spring could be had, and Mr. Swartz in Sweden 
uses fee-water, at about 40°. The colder the 
water, the larger the diameter of the can may be. 
If the water stands at 60°, then a diameter of 
8 inches is large enough. The point is to have 
the mass of. milk cooled as soon as practicable. 
If it were first passed through a cooler, then the 
can might be of any size that would not expose 
too much surface to the air. 
We hear a great deal about the “ animal heat” 
of milk, and we do not always stop to think 
that animal heat is exactly the same as auy other 
heat. It is produced by the combustion of a 
different fuel in a different sort of stove, but as 
heat it is the same as though it came from an 
anthracite fire. Fresh, cooled milk, raised again 
to blood-heat, by being set over a fire, would be 
as badly off as though it still retained its “ ani¬ 
mal” beat. 
--- -*-•*-i- 
An Egg Farm. 
by h. h. stoddabd. —Concluding Article. 
Two buildings remain to be described. Fig. 
1 represents a hospital, that is, a building that 
can be used as such in an emergency’. It is 14 
feet wide, 60 feet long, and 8 feet high at the 
peak. There is a passage 2k feet wide, running 
its whole length the north side, which commu¬ 
nicates with the twelve rooms into which the 
building is divided by wire partitions. The 
glazed roof is upon the south side. There is an 
outside door (not shown in the figure) in the 
north wall, opposite the chimney, for conve¬ 
nience in attending the fire. The building is 
warmed by coal, a fire-cliamber of brick, and a 
boiler and hot-water pipes being used. It is in¬ 
jurious to animals to breathe the fumes that will 
escape when it is attempted to warm a room by 
passing a smoke-pipe through it, leading from a 
coal-fire, unless the chimney is quite high, caus¬ 
ing a strong draft, which is one reason for pre¬ 
ferring hot water, and another is that the risk of 
overheating is not so great (for water can not be 
heated above a certain temperature), and a third 
reason is that less fuel is needed with hot water 
than without. The original cost of hot-water 
fixtures is double, it is true, but they are kept in 
repair with hardly the expense of a cent, and 
cause a saving of full half the fuel. The ven¬ 
tilator at the top of the building has immovable 
blinds at its sides; and horizontal doors at its 
bottom, opening upwards, and closing by their 
own weight, moved by means of cords aud pul¬ 
leys, regulate the egress of air. At the north 
side of the building are a number of small win¬ 
dows, covered with ordiuary adjustable blinds, 
for the admission of fresh air, and in summer 
the doors at both ends of the structure may be 
opened, as in the illustration, and the windows 
in the roof should be partly curtained. This 
building is used for early chickens and numerous 
other purposes, it not being expected to have 
much occasion to take care of sick fowls, for the 
