292 
prevails in many of the Continental states, such 
| asin the north of Spain, France, and Flanders. 
Of the last the Rev. W. Rham observes—‘ The 
husbandry of the whole of the north-eastern part 
of East Flanders, where the soilis good sandy 
loam, may be considered as a mixed cultivation, 
partly by the plough and partly by the spade. 
Without the spade it would be impossible to give 
that finish to the land, after if is sown, which 
makes it appear so like a garden, and which is 
the chief cause of the more certain vegetation of 
the seed. There is also a great saving of seed 
by this practice, as may be seen by comparing 
the quantity actually sown in Flanders with that 
required in other countries where the spade is 
more sparingly used. In large farms in England, 
the spade is only used to dig out water furrows ; 
but in Flanders, where the land is usually laid 
in stetches of about six or seven feet wide, the 
intervals are always dug out with the spade, 
and the earth spread evenly (sifted as they call 
it) over the seed which has been harrowed in. 
The trenches are so arranged that every year a 
fresh portion of the ground is dug out, and in 
six years the whole land will have been dug to 
the depth of, at least, one foot. In the next 
course, the trench is dug a few inches deeper, 
which brings up a little of the subsoil; and, after 
four or five such courses of trenching, the whole 
soil comes to be of a uniform quality to the depth 
of from eighteen to twenty inches, a most im- 
portant circumstance to the growth of flax, po- 
tatoes, and carrots. In the Waes country they 
proceed differently, for they have a soil which, 
by repeated trenchings, has long been uniform 
in quality to the required depth; there they 
regularly trench one-sixth part of the land every 
year, and plant it with potatoes or sow carrots 
upon it.’ 
“If we direct our attention even to those 
cases where small plots of land are exclusively 
farmed, not gardened, by the spade or fork, 
the result is still more satisfactory; and here, 
too, the good effects produced, the strangely 
enlarged fertility of the soil, is almost entirely 
attributable to the deep forking. Let any tra- 
veller by the south-western railway (to take at 
once an extreme case) notice the results of deep 
stirring in some of the little cottage gardens en- 
closed from the heaths of Woking and Bagshot ; 
let him witness the luxuriant little crops of 
both wheat and the common culinary vegetables 
growing in the gardens of these little peasants’ 
nests, all looking as thriving and as luxuriant as 
possible; and yet this effect is all the work of 
the deeply penetrating fork or spade. Let the 
passenger compare these with the surrounding 
heath-covered lands, and it will be impossible for 
him to arrive but at one conclusion. The distant 
cultivator will judge at once of the natural po- 
verty of the soil of Bagshot Heath by its chemi- 
cal composition. It contains in 400 parts, after 
being heated to redness, 380 of coarse siliceous 
SPADE HUSBANDRY. 
sand, 9 of fine siliceous sand, and 11 of clay, 
oxide of iron, and carbonate of lime, And it is 
not to the sandy soils that the benefits of fork 
husbandry are confined. On the chalky soils of 
Eastbourne, during the last few years, a consi- 
derable extent of land has been let out to about 
400 little spade-cultivators, holding, as regards 
extent, in every proportion, from a few square . 
rods to as many acres. One of these, George 
Cruttenden, a schoolmaster of Willingdon, re- 
ports, April 1842:—‘ The quantity of land I rent 
is five acres, on the side of the South Downs, at 
£3 per acre—this, with £10 for my house, makes 
£25. I have now three cows, a heifer, and a 
calf, standing opposite to each other, with a road 
between the mangers for feeding these stall-fed 
cattle. Jam satisfied that I can keep two cows 
on the same quantity of land, stall-fed, that I 
could keep one if I allowed it to graze.’ It is 
true that in this last successful instance, Crut- 
tenden keeps a thriving little agricultural school, 
whose scholars, in return for their tuition, assist 
him in the cultivation of the five acres,—these 
yielded him a clear profit of £40 in 1842. 
“Tt is an error into which the farmer very 
commonly falls, to conclude that there is any 
material difference in the earthy composition of 
uncultivated soils and the substratum ; for, gen- 
erally speaking, the only difference between the 
surface soil and the stratum on which it imme- 
diately rests consists in the upper soil contain- 
ing a larger proportion of soluble and decompos- 
ing organic matter. It is only the absence of 
these from the substratum which renders it, 
when too copiously mixed with the surface soil, 
rather prejudicial at first than otherwise; and 
this is one reason why the fork is preferable in 
the first instance, of deepening the soil, to the 
spade or to very deep ploughing, since the fork 
deepens and loosens the soil, perhaps to a greater 
extent than either of the other implements, but 
then it does not bring to the surface so much of 
the substratum. There is no doubt with regard 
to the similarity of composition in the different 
soils and subsoils. The principal mineral in the 
‘soil of any district, as Mr. Morton observes, is 
that of the geological formation under it; hence 
we find argillaceous soil resting on the various 
clay formations, calcareous soil over the chalk 
and oolitic rocks, and siliceous soils over the 
various sandstones. On the chalk, the soil is 
white; on the red sandstone it is red, and on 
the sands and clays the surface has nearly the 
same shade of colour as the subsoil. And, in 
fact, we perceive a change in the external ap- 
pearance of the surface wherever there is a, 
change in the subsoil below. If, then, these are 
correctly stated facts—if such superior fertilizing 
effects are produced by the use of the fork beyond 
those which follow the plough—ought we not 
indeed to rejoice? Should we not exult that 
here is opened to the cultivator another source 
of fertility; one, too, not confined to any par- 
