Wet Days at Edgewood with Old Farmers, Old Gardeners, and Old Pastorals

📘 This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1884 edition. Excerpt: ... Charles Drury, in the same year, recommended, in an elaborate treatise, the steaming of straw, roots, and hay, for cattle-food, -- a recommendation which, in our time, has been put into most successful practice.* Mowbray, who was for a long time the great authority upon Domestic Fowls and their Treatment, published his book in 1803, which he represents as having been compiled from the memoranda of forty years' experience. Sir Humphry Davy. EXT, as illustrative of the rural literature of the early part of this century, I must introduce the august name of Sir Humphry Davy. This I am warranted in doing on two several counts: first, because he was an accomplished fisherman and the author of " Salmonia," and next, because he was the first scientific man of any repute who was formally invited by a Board of Agriculture to discuss the relations of Chemistry to the practice of farming. Unfortunately, he was himself ignorant of practical agriculture,! when called upon to illustrate its relations • The success of the method has been most abundantly proved, so fer as relates to the feeding of milch-cows; for beef-or store-cattle steamed food is of more doubtful policy, while for horses the best breeders condemn it without reserve. t See letter of Thomas Poole, p. 322, Fragmentary Remains of Sir Humphry Davy. to chemistry; but, like an earnest man, he set about informing himself by communication with the best farmers of the kingdom. He delivered a very admirable series of lectures, and it was without doubt most agreeable to the country-gentlemen to find the great waste from their fermenting manures made clear by Sir Humphry's retorts; but Davy was too profound and too honest a man to lay down for farmers any chemical high-road to success. He...