grain production of Canada and New York in 1860, bearing in mind that the extent of cultivated land must be at least double in the latter :

With such a table as this before us, can we rest entirely contented with our present mode of farming? Can we continue to sneer at root crops as we have done in the past, when, with the same obstacles to contend against, and the same course of reasoning in equal force to oppose them, they are still doing so well for the farmers of the neighboring Province? And we can not forbear calling attention to the fact that, whatever the opposition to the introduction of root crops, when they once fairly obtain a foothold as a farm crop, they appear to grow rapidly in favor. A correspondent at Port Hope, C. W., wrote us last year, (see Country Gentleman, vol. xxi, p. 241):

"According to the census of 1851, there were over 3,000,000 bushels of turnips grown in Upper Canada, and about 182 bushels was the average yield per acre. In the year 1861 the turnip orop had increased to over 18,000,000 bushels; the average per acre had increased to 248 bushels. Although this is but a low average, it is a great improvement in ten years, and probably the average per acre will be doubled by the next census."

Does not this show convincingly that with practice in growing roots comes increased success in the yield obtained, just as with practice in feeding them comes an increased conviction of their value?

But there is another point to illustrate the more correct basis upon which the farming of Upper Canada is conducted. Our so-called “rotations" here not only lack root crops, but any thing else of any great importance, except clover and grass, to intersperse with the cereal grains. Indian corn, although varying in mode of culture and growth from wheat or barley, is also a cereal, and it is comparatively little change in the draft upon the soil-little actual rotation to alternate one with the other. In Canada they employ the pea largely for a rotating crop-a plant wholly different in character from the cereals, and well suited for the purpose, while at the same time supplying an admirable food for sheep. Some of our best sheep feeders have constantly resorted to Canada (except when the price arose too high to permit it) for peas in preference to any other feed; our home markets do not supply them—indeed, as Col. Johnson says in the address referred to, Upper Canada produces nearly three times the quantity of peas raised in all our twenty-one grain-growing States put together! That the home market for them is tolerably good, we may infer from the fact that they are not always to be had here at a price admitting their liberal use.

Here we certainly have the elements of a more systematic and scientific culture than obtains among ourselves. The average per acre of the crops in Canada West, as reported in the census of 1861, are very creditable to the practical workings of the system; they were, in bushels :

And although, as Mr. President Johnson states, "there are great difficulties in the way of the adoption of the system of rotation of crops practiced in Britain, principally owing to the expense of having the usual proportions of land under drill husbandry,"—still a much nearer approach has there been made to it, and the principle on which it is founded, than is the case in any large portion of our own country.

There is but one other statement in the paper before us, to which we shall refer. Adding together the total bushels of eight principal crops, (wheat, rye, Indian corn, oats, barley, buck. wheat, peas, and potatoes) Col. J. finds that

"In examining these returns, we find that no State produced as much wheat as Upper Canada. But in the article of Indian corn, Upper Canada is decidedly below any one of these States in production; even the State of Maine, with its rigorous climate and poor soil, compared with its population, is far before us in this respect, showing that with respect to the estimation in which peas and Indian corn are held in Upper Canada and in these States, there is a very marked and striking difference; whether we or they are right in this respect may be a subject of controversy. It is, however, well understood in Canada that there is scarcely in the whole catalogue a more valuable article of produce than peas. I make this comparison in no spirit of vain exultation, but simply to show that, tried by this test, the agricultural capacity of Upper Canada exhibits a favorable comparison."

We can at least compliment our Canadian friends upon the character of the exhibit, and the Provincial Association upon the able and practical address of its retiring President.

On a previous page we mentioned that in our judgment it would be more profitable if some farmers would grow fewer crops and grow them better. We were led into this train of thought whilst making an agricultural survey of Franklin county, and have frequently mentioned it to farmers, and we are not sure, judging from subsequent conversations, that they did not feel the full force of the remark, and as a general thing inquired how to proceed to cultivate better. We suggested then that almost all the lands in the county would be benefitted by underdraining, and then explained

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DRAINING.

"The chain of life is a curious one. We have a regular and beautiful gradation from the lowest and meanest cell up to the intellectual organiza-, tion of a Humboldt or a Newton. But the different degrees of life, as we may call them, not only appear thus in order, but also dependent upon each other. They are really linked together. There is no independent existence. Without adopting an hypothesis which for the present seems to be in pretty general favor, that the higher forms of life are natural

In 1860 Ohio produced 153,113,341 bushels, or 65.45 per head of her population. See Ohio Agricultural Report for 1860, pages 30, 31.-KLIPPART.

growths out of lower, we may with perfect confidence assert that, let the germ come whence it may, the higher as a rule succeeds the lower, and is dependent upon it. Looking chiefly to the more valuable, and perhaps more permanent forms of life, we may regard the inferior as merely occupying a relationship somewhat analogous to that which the scaffolding does to the house, or indeed to the timber which enters into the structure of the house. The tree required not only to grow, but to be afterwards broken up, in order that it might be used in the building. So the earlier and lower forms of life were necessary to the subsequent and superior forms. Whilst those were growing, living, dying, they were neither growing, living, nor dying for themselves alone; they were preparing place and material for the existence of their successors. But we must not forget that whilst the inferior forms of organized beings were thus to so great an extent necessary to the existence of the superior, they were the only forms possible under the circumstances. Even if the superior forms had the raw or partially formed material ready to be used up by them, they could not have appropriated it; or even if they could have taken it up, they could not have elaborated it into their present forms. Not only so, but if the superior organisms which we now see around us, in this most advanced stage in the progress of the earth, were overtaken by a set of circumstances similar to those in which the inferior lived, the order of things would be entirely reversed. "Similar causes, in similar circumstances, produce similar effects." To produce dissimilar effects, we may change the causes and let the circumstances remain, or we may change the circumstances and let the causes remain the same. In the present circumstances, generally speaking, the superior forms of beings are enabled to subsist to a great extent not only in the place of the inferior, but upon them; and all our true progress in agriculture is but the carrying out of this law. We have said that, to a certain extent, the superior organisms are enabled to take the place of the past, and subsist upon the inferior. If it were not so, the agriculture of man were impossible; and if this supremacy of the superior over the inferior prevailed to the fullest extent, then agriculture by man were unnecessary. From the present point of view we may say that the agriculturist is but operating on soil, climate, and plants, to help forward in some minute details a course of amelioration, which, however slowly, is going on at any rate. The coral insect is working in its own way to form reefs, islands, and continents, and raise a surface into the dry medium of the air. When this is done, forms of life which were impossible before become actual. But if these lands are again submerged, even though the terrestrial plants be rooted there, marine plants spring up on their ruins. When, even after the separation of the land from the sea, the atmosphere was still of a dull, thick, and hazy character, impene

trable by the rays of the sun, the superior plants of which we speak did not and could not exist; and if that state of land and atmosphere were restored, the inferior plants would obtain the ascendancy, and actually make a prey of the superior. The two classes of organized beings exist, and which has the ascendancy depends upon circumstances; which, in fact, devours or is devoured, depends upon certain now pretty well defined conditions. We have seen that the superior prey upon the inferior in proportion as the earth advances from a chaotic state; that to the extent to which the older conditions remain, the inferior preys upon the superior, just as in inferior husbandry weeds gain the mastery over the crops, but when all the conditions are observed, the crops triumph over their enemies." These remarks may appear to have a very remote reference to the subject to which we mean to apply them. They, however, show the exact place which certain agricultural operations occupy in the great scheme of terrestrial progress, and they prepare us to understand the position which the creature, man himself, holds amid the changes through which the globe and its atmosphere are passing. In some former articles* we pointed out with sufficient clearness for the occasion how draining prepared the land both for wet and for dry seasons, how it kept up the temperature of the soil, and even that it enabled superior plants to maintain their ascendancy over inferior ones. One of the great conditions which we have noted in the progress of the globe to its present state, is one perfectly analogous to the agricultural process of draining, the elevating of the land above the sea, and the clearing of the atmosphere. Just as the operations of agriculture, when viewed with intelligence, help us to understand the great processes which are going on around us, independently of our will, so do these processes in their turn help us to assign their proper places and value to those things which experience had taught but did not explain to our fathers. The thoroughly cultivated field or farm represents the really advanced state of the earth, in which conditions favorable to the development of the higher forms of life are established; the badly cultivated field or farm represents the other stages in the earth's progress, in which only inferior forms of plants and animals could exist. In the former, the soil by being well drained maintains its temperature, permits a certain circulation of air and moisture, and by preventing noxious exhalations from the soil, allows the vivifying rays of the sun to visit the vegetation. In this case the superior plants thrive apace, and soon turn any others which come their way into the means of subsistence. When, however, these conditions are not observed, and we have more or less of that state of things in which inferior plants only did and could exist, what wonder if, for example, the noble

• Ohio Agricultural Report for 1860, and Principles and Practice of Draining: By J. H Klippart, 1861.

and useful plant wheat should fall a prey to the inferior and useless smut fungus. Just in accordance with the general law which we have dimly traced, we may place wheat in those conditions which are favorable to inferior life only, but we cannot make it thrive. In placing it so, we but give the superior as food for the inferior. We sow wheat in land which has not been sufficiently drained, and besides the other causes unfavorable to the growth of these plants, it has to struggle amid vapors from the soil, which are highly favorable to another species of plant, but the growth of which is inimical to that of the wheat. Thus it is that the parasitic plant covers up and fastens upon the wheat, not, as we now see, in the face of all known laws, but clearly in accordance with laws that have been in steady operation since the world began. In the same way we allow other land to remain close, cold, and water-logged, under an inferior species of socalled pasturage, and instead of plants rich as food for animals, we have parasites and others produced, which are not only destructive of these higher forms of vegetable life, but actually attack animals themselves.

Whether we have hit upon the exact immediate cause or not of the curious cases in which the herbage of certain fields causes the hair to fall off the animals grazing upon them, we have here most certainly the class of causes to which we have every right to trace the strange phenomenon ; and that we have hit the exact cause itself is made more than probable by the fact that the herbage in those fields which may be used by animals with impunity, is that which grows upon portions of the lands which have naturally those advantages which drainage alone can give to others. The high and dry land naturally grows plants of a superior order; the low and undrained nurtures parasitic fungi, which make a prey of the superior, and in the animal economy produce effects the opposite of those for which food is intended. Here, then, is another reason for draining, showing that instead of flagging in our efforts, we should, particularly in our humid climate, follow up our past labors in this respect with increased energy."

After the lands have been underdrained, then they should be deepplowed. Some have suggested that deep plowing did no good, but as there is a right way and a wrong way of plowing, so there is also a right time and a wrong time for deep plowing. In order that all may be benefitted by the experiences of the past, we present the following

HINTS ON DEEP PLOWING.

That deep plowing is often very beneficial to many soils, does not admit of a question among intelligent farmers. The when and where is the only point of dispute. We find in an English agricultural paper this subject discussed at some length, and think the points brought out will interest