87-8 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
[October, 
of a stream for irrigation, or for ponds which 
might supply a stock of ice for a house or dairy, 
or for several of them. We are only now com¬ 
mencing to learn the value of the streams which 
traverse our farms, and which might be made 
to do ditty as water-powers for churning or 
thrashing, for fertilizing meadows, for supplying 
ponds, for ornament, or for furnishing ice. 
But before the streams can be thus used, it is 
necessary to build the dam. It is a rule in all 
sorts of engineering work, from the making of 
a simple pond-dam or a hill-side road, up to the 
building of railroad or other large embank¬ 
ments, that an old surface and fresh earth do 
not bind or adhere together well. A want of 
knowledge of this fact frequently leads to dams 
being leaky at the bottom and their early de¬ 
struction. It becomes necessary, then, first to 
make the foundation by removing the surface, 
and more particularly so if the surface is sod, or 
rough swampy ground covered with tussocks or 
coarse grass. It is best therefore to excavate anar- 
row ditch where the center of the dam is to be, 
and throw the earth outside of it. If there are 
sods, they should be reserved to finish off the 
slope by planting fragments of it here and there, 
which by and by will spread until the}' meet and 
completely cover the surface. If musk-rats are 
to be feared, it will be necessaiy to drive stakes 
down in the center of the trench, and fasten to 
them hemlock boards or planks, which will pre¬ 
vent the animals from burrowing through the 
dam, and also will have the effect of greatly 
strengthening it. Then the trench should be 
filled with clay or stiff loam well tramped 
down, and packed by having water thrown on 
to it, until a ridge the liight of the finished dam 
is made. Then on the inside (but not 011 the 
outside) fine brush may be laid and covered with 
earth well worked down, and two or three lay¬ 
ers may thus be made. In case of a freshet or 
of water washing against the dam, this brush 
will tend very much to bind and strengthen it. 
The back of the dam may be built up of stone 
or coarse gravel, but nothing but the most 
closely-binding and compact materials should 
be used for the front and the center. Figure 2 
shows a section of a dam thus built, the trench 
Fig. 2. —SECTION OF DAM. 
with the plank in the center, and the layers of 
brush worked into the front. 
The weakest part of a dam is very apt to be 
where the waste-gate is built in, but if this is 
properly done there will be no trouble. There 
should be a framework made, consisting of two 
parts, one for each side of the gate. Each part 
consists of a post mortised into the mud-sill, 
and two braces mortised into the sill and the 
post, as in fig. 1 (page 377). The ends of 
this frame are boarded up on the inside. The 
boards rest against cleats, which are spiked to 
the sill and braces to prevent them from being 
forced inwards by the pressure of the earth. 
The sides of the gate are kept apart by means 
of the plate at the top of the posts and the 
planks at t he bottom, on which the falling water 
is received to prevent washing out of the bed. 
The gale itself consists of planks cut to a length 
to fit the frame and to lie loosely against the up¬ 
right posts, where they are held by the pressure 
of the water. They can be easily removed or 
lifted by means of a bar whenever the water is 
to be lowered or run off, and the water may 
be kept at any desired bight by the arrangement 
of these boards. In setting the gate-frame, care 
must be taken to fill in around the bottom and 
the sills with clay, so that no water cau escape. 
The Lactometer. 
The lactometer, or instrument by which the 
quality and value of milk may be measured, 
Fig. 1. —HACK WITH TUBES. 
should be used by every farmer who owns more 
than one cow. Where there are but two, it be¬ 
comes a matter of interest and curiosity to know 
which one is the better, and where there are a 
dozen the probability is that there will be found 
one amongst the lot which is not worth keeping, 
and she can not easily be detected without ex¬ 
perimenting on her milk with the lactometer. 
One of the first requisites to an improvement in 
our dairy slock is a simple means of detecting 
those which are unprofitable to keep, and by 
getting rid of them as soon as possible prevent¬ 
ing the perpetuation of poor stock. It is only 
by breeding from our best cows by means of 
bulls descended from dams which excel in the 
quality of their milk that we can hope to im¬ 
prove our dairy stock; and that our stock needs 
and is susceptible of vast 
improvement is plain to 
those who know liow poor 
is the average product of 
our cows. We very rarely 
think of the fact that the 
average yield of butter in 
the United States is only a 
quarter of a pound per 
cow per day, or of milk 
only four quarts. The 
discovery of these poor 
cows, by which the aver¬ 
age is so much reduced, 
and their separation from 
our herds, depend on the 
use of some such instru¬ 
ment as is here proposed. 
It is simply and easily 
made. A frame consisting 
of a lower and an upper 
platform with supporting 
columns at the corners is 
made; holes to receive the 
glass tubes are bored 
through the upper plat¬ 
form, and the tubes are 
common glass test-tubes, 
which may be procured 
druggist. The tubes 
Fig. 2. —GRADUATED 
TUBE. 
from or by any 
should be divided 
by marks made with a common file into ten 
spaces of equal size. The sjiaces or degrees 
may be one inch in length, in which case the 
tubes should be eleven inches long; or the divi¬ 
sions may be half an inch apart, in which case 
the tube should be six inches in length. Fig. 2 
shows the tube graduated into spaces. 
When filled to the uppermost mark with milk 
free from air-bubbles or foam, the tubes are sus¬ 
pended in the frame, and are to be kept undis¬ 
turbed for a determined length of time, and the 
amount of cream which has risen is then noted, 
when it may remain longer to note any further 
rise of cream, or the separation of the whey 
from the curd if it is desired to test the amount 
of whey or Water or solid matter or curd in the 
milk. Those lactometers which test the quality 
of milk by its specific gravity are often incorrect 
and fallacious, as the richest milk is of the 
lightest specific gravity, and is not to be distin¬ 
guished by such a test from watered milks. 
The exact percentage of cream may be ascer¬ 
tained by dividing the upper spaces into tenths. 
Each tenth would represent one hundredth part 
or one per cent of the whole milk. Thus, if the 
cream occupies five of the small spaces, there is 
five per cent; if one large space, there is ten per¬ 
cent ; and if one large space and two small ones 
there would be twelve per cent; two large spaces 
would give twenty per cent of cream. 
As one quart of pure cream will make a pound 
of butter, the value of each cow as a butter-pro¬ 
ducer is readily ascertained, for if she should 
yield 10 qts. of milk of which ten per cent or one 
tenth is cream, she may be expected to produce 
one pound of butter per day, and so on. 
Editorial Correspondence. 
[This letter from our associate should have 
appeared earlier, but its fact3 are as interesting 
at one time as another.— Ed.] 
Denver, Col., July 10th, 1872. 
Slaughtered Buffalo.— Is it not about 
time that the indiscriminate slaughter of the 
buffalo was stopped ? We counted in plain sight 
from the cars at Buffalo depot 125 carcasses 
and skeletons of buffaloes in various stages of 
decomposition. This station is about the center 
of the buffalo range, and for a long distance 
east and west on the railroad the work of de¬ 
struction goes steadily on the j-ear round. Here 
our royal guest Alexis came last winter, and is 
said to have slain forty of these animals. Sports 
from the Eastern cities, rich men’s sons in search 
of new sensations, merchants and bankers on 
vacation trips, European travelers doing the 
Western Continent, stay over a few days on the 
plains to chase buffalo. Men who make a busi¬ 
ness of hunting live at the stations, and kill all 
of this game they can. They thoroughly un¬ 
derstand the habits'of the animal, know how to 
approach him, and just where to send the deadly 
bullet. They arc by far the most destructive of 
any class that hunt buffalo. A large portion of 
the fresh meat consumed at these stations is 
furnished by them, and in the winter buffalo 
hind-quarters, with the skin on, are shipped in 
immense numbers to New York and other East¬ 
ern cities. The meat- in its season is about as 
cheap as beef in these city markets. It is esti¬ 
mated that a hundred thousand buffalo are 
slain annually in this region. Since we were 
here last year a new traffic has sprung up of 
considerable importance. We saw at Bunker 
Hill, Fossil, and other stations, immense quan¬ 
tities of bones brought in from the adjacent 
prairies to he shipped East for the manufacture 
of bone-dust and phosphates. As they are found 
everywhere in abundance, and bring about 
twenty dollars a ton in market, it pays very well 
to gather them. Besides the meat sent off in 
