ART. III-1. Chemie für Landwirthe. (Chemistry for Farmers.) By Dr CARL SPRENGEL. 2 vols. 8vo. Gottingen:

1831.

2. Die Bodenkunde, oder Die Lehre vom Boden. (A Treatise on Soils.) By Dr CARL SPRENGEL. 8vo. Leipzig:

1837.

3. Die Lehre vom Dünger. (A Treatise on Manures.) By Dr CARL SPRENGEL. 8vo. Leipzig: 1839.

4. Remarks on Thorough Draining and Deep Ploughing. By James Smith, Esq. of Deanston Works. (A Pamphlet.) Fourth Edition. Stirling: 1838.

5. Organic Chemistry applied to Agriculture and Physiology. By Dr JUSTUS LIEBIG, Translated from the German by LYON PLAYFAIR, Ph. D. Third Edition. 8vo. London: 1844.

6. Lectures on Agricultural Chemistry and Geology. By JAMES F. W. JOHNSTON, F.R.S. 8vo. London: 1844.

7. Elements of Agricultural Chemistry and Geology. By JAMES F. W. JOHNSTON, F.R.S. 12mo. Fourth Edition." London and Edinburgh: 1844.

8. Catechism of Agricultural Chemistry and Geology. By JAMES F. W. JOHNSTON, F.R.S. (A Pamphlet.) Eighth Edition. Edinburgh and London: 1844.

9. Essai de Statique Chimique des Etres Organisés. Par MM. DUMAS et BOUSSIN GAULT. 8vo. Troisième Edition. Paris: 1844.

10. Economie Rurale. Par M. J. B. BOUSSINGAULT. 2 tomes 8vo. Paris: 1844.

11. Proeve eener Algemeene Physiologische Scheikunde. Door G. J. MULDER. Hooglerar, te Utrecht. Rotterdam: 1844. 12. The Chemistry of Vegetable and Animal Physiology. By PROFESSOR MULDER of Utrecht. Translated from the Dutch by Dr FROMBERG. Part I. London: 1844.

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'IN my estimation,' says a recent German writer, the Agricultural Periodicals of England and Scotland, especially 'the latest of them, are of high interest in Germany; not so

'much in presenting a pattern that we should altogether imitate, as in exhibiting the successive steps taken by the government, and by private individuals, in those countries, with the view of 'sustaining their enormous population.'

If it be a difficult task for British Agriculture to fill with wholesome food the mouths of the present population of the island-how will it be able to fulfil this destination sixty years hence, when, at the present rate of increase, the population will be doubled? Before the sons of the present generation become old men, Great Britain alone may contain forty millions of people. How is all this increase to be fed from the produce of the same extent of land? Can this land as a whole, really be made to bear the double of its present crops? If it can, as many think it may, what steps ought to be adopted with the view of promoting of hastening forward rather-this increased state of productiveness?

Other countries may look forward with less apprehension to such a contingent increase of their inhabitants. We speak not of Norway, Sweden, Russia, Poland, or of the North of Europe, generally, where wide tracts of land are waiting untenanted for new accessions of people; but of those other districts towards the South, where the wants of the population already border on the supposed limits of the productive powers of the soil on which they live. Happen what may, these countries can never be in the condition to which Great Britain seems destined to come. The overflowings of one of these countries will press onward into some other, in which there is space to receive them. The German craftsman is early accustomed to a peripatetic life; and it is little to him, whether, at the close of his wanderings, he settle down on the Rhine, the Danube, or the Vistula. So the too frequent swarms of the French provinces may hive, as of old, beyond the Alps or the Rhine. In either country, the individual who is cramped at home, whatever his station or resources, may more or less easily escape into less peopled districts. The feeble barriers of the Douane or of the Polizei cannot confine the natural expansion of a whole people.

But it is otherwise in Britain. That insular position to which we owe so much of our freedom from foreign aggression, and which is a main source of our national safety and greatness, hems in and confines the people. The poor man cannot take up his staff and trudge across wide seas, in search of another home. The needy Highlander may, with his family, beg his way from John-o'-Groat's to the Lizard, but further he cannot go. Without money he cannot reach a new country.

And if he possess a little money, his spirit of enterprise is damped by the consideration, that should he prove unfortunate, he cannot, without money, return to his own country, but must die in a land of strangers.

Thus, whatever aid emigration, either individual or national, may lend in partially retarding the increase of our population, it is clear that it must very rapidly augment that the additional people must for the most part stay at home and that the soil will, year by year, (unless some severe dispensation of Providence intervene,) be called upon to provide food for an augmented num→ her of inhabitants.

What, then, is doing, and what may yet be done, with the view of increasing the actual produce of the land ?

The natural progress of agricultural improvement is, in its main steps, easily traced. It is determined partly by the nature of the soil, and in part by the density of the population. At first the people are few land therefore abundant, instruments rude, live stock thinly scattered, and manure little cared for or collected. Only where the land is dry, or of lighter quality, and easily stirred, is the natural herbage broken up. Corn is there sown, and crop after crop is taken, till the produce dwindles down to three or four seeds, when the soil is for the time abandoned, and new land broken up, to be subjected to a similar exhausting tillage. Such has been more or less the case in our time with all the older states of the American union; such was formerly the case in many parts of Scotland; and such is still the case on the plains of Russia and Poland. In this stage of agriculture, manure is almost unthought of, except as a nuisance which unavoidably accumulates, and calls for labour to remove it. On the shores of the Wolga, and its tributary streams, winter aids the farmer in removing his dung-heaps. They are carted on to the ice when the rivers are frozen, and the thaw sweeps them down towards the Caspian sea.

But as land becomes less comparatively abundant, corn must be raised more frequently from the same spot, and one or other of the simplest forms of rotation will be introduced. The farm is divided into three portions one in perpetual grass, on which the live stock graze in summer, and which yields hay for their winter's food-the other two in arable culture. From the latter, in the colder countries, as was till lately the case in Sweden, a crop is taken in each alternate year. The value of manure is now, in some measure, understood, and the droppings of the cattle are collected and bestowed upon the land. We do not indeed insist upon this yearly alternating corn and naked fallow-though a rude form of husbandry found in countries where agriculture is still

young as necessarily and immediately succeeding to the system of perennial and exhausting crops of corn. It may be too sudden a transition, to pass at once from many successive crops, and many years of fallow, to a single season of each; but it must, we think, be considered as a stage through which an advancing people will pass. It cannot be the result of a high refinement in agriculture, since such refinement accompanies only an increase of population; which is generally followed by a diminution of naked fallows-which cannot, in fact, afford that the land should lie idle every other year.

Where a diversity of soils prevails, as is so much the case in this island, those parts are first selected for arable culture which, not being blown or naked sands, are naturally the driest,-are worked at the least cost of time and labour, and give the most sure return. Thus certain districts-certain whole countiesthe surface of some entire geological formations-have been ploughed and sown from time immemorial; while others have lain as long in permanent pasture. Hence it is, that on some of the stiffest clay lands of England, the richest old grasses exist. Hence, also, in counties abounding in clayey soils, the oldest villages are usually found upon the lighter land, or on the hills or ridges of sand and gravel which here and there cover or pierce through the clay. Such a case presents itself in the eastern half of the county of Durham, in which every old village or parish church-almost without exception-between the Wear and the Tees, is situated on such rounded hills or banks, or flats of sand and limestone gravel; on which tillage is easy, the natural drainage good, and the rains of a humid climate of less hurtful influence.

Such lighter land being all in occupation, the next step the farmer is induced to take, as the demand for corn increases, is further to diminish his naked fallows-to adopt, for example, the ancient three-course shift (two crops between each naked fallow) which to the present day characterizes a very large portion of the North European agriculture. Naked fallows could not yet be abolished, even on soils from which weeds could be readily extirpated. Where manuring is little understood or cared for, they must still prevail. If we do not renovate the land by adding to it some equivalent for what we take off, we must, for a time, leave our fields to themselves, to renovate their exhausted powers as they may.

But to this state of things succeeds the alternate husbandry. Instead of naked fallows, green crops-called hence fallow crops -are grown on the land, which otherwise would have been idle. To eat these green crops, cattle are kept in greater numbers.

More manure is thus produced. When laid on the land, this manure causes more corn to grow on the same extent of surface, so that a larger measure of grain is carried to market by the farmer than before; while the green crops, or rather the beef and mutton into which they have been converted, form a clear gain of food to the country, and of profit to the husbandman.

Still other benefits follow this change. Armed with this new supply of manure- —a new engine, as it were, placed at her command-improvement turns now to the uncultivated lands. Light sands, and dry heaths and commons, which refused to grow corn crops alone, are brought, by means of alternate green crops, and eating off with sheep, or other forms of copious manuring, to yield continuous and profitable returns. Thus wide wastes, like those which formerly covered Norfolk and Lincolnshire, are converted into productive domains-rich in sheep and corn, honourable to the improvers, and of great value to the state.

And now the dry land of easy tillage, and at moderate elevations, being pretty generally worked up, improvement again takes a new direction. Emboldened by past success to expend her labour and capital more freely, she discovers that the levels of lakes may be lowered, and good land around their margins thus cheaply bought; that bogs may be drained and wet lands laid comparatively dry, by making open or covered ditches (drains) wherever springs arise, and thus diverting their waters into fixed channels. These first steps in drainage add largely to the available surface of countries in which, as in ours, much rain falls. In Britain they have already done a considerable part of their work-though vast tracts of bog are still ready, both in Britain and in Ireland, to reward the industrious improver. In Sweden and Norway they are at present promising to add nearly an entire third to the best land of the Scandinavian peninsula. Meanwhile, other important advances are making. Green crops yield much manure, but they also require much. It is discovered by some that the higher the farming-the more liberal the supply of manure-the greater the profit. Hence the manure of the towns comes to be eagerly sought for, and the produce of the neighbouring lands is largely increased. But the farmer who lives remote from towns cannot avail himself of these supplies. For him, therefore, lighter, drier, and more concentrated manures are in request. And thus arises a new and enlivening demand, that for bones, rape-dust, and other portable manures -or hand tillages, as the Yorkshire farmers call them-experience having previously shown that such substances were really capable of augmenting the produce of the soil.

Thus the country farmer and the town farmer are again placed