Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 401, March 1849

"The halesome parritch, chief o' Scotia's food."

Burns.

Forfarshire has long been famed for the quality of its brose and oat-cake, while the porridge of the Borders has as long been equally famous. It is so everywhere, the sharp soil producing the finest cake-meal, and clay land the best meal for boiling. Of meal from the varieties of the oat cultivated, that of the common Angus oat is the most thrifty for a poor man, though its yield in meal is less in proportion to the bulk of corn."

Much valuable information is given on the management of manure-heaps, and the forming of composts in winter. We especially recommend to the reader's attention section 2043, which is too long to extract. Railways have done much to benefit the farmer: in speaking of composts, our author gives us the following example of a local injury produced by them: —

"In the vicinity of villages where fish are cured and smoked for market, refuse of fish heads and guts make an excellent compost with earth. Near Eyemouth and Burnmouth, on the Berwickshire coast, 30 barrels of fish refuse, with as much earth from the head-ridges as will completely cover the heap, are sufficient for an imperial acre. The barrel contains 30 gallons, and 4 barrels make a cart-load, and the barrel sells for 1s. 6d. From 400 to 600 barrels may be obtained for each farm in the neighbourhood, in the course of the season. Since the opening of the North British railway, the curing of the fish is given up, much to the loss of the farmers in that locality; and the fishermen now send, by the railway, the fish in a fresh state to the larger towns at a distance. Thus, railways produce advantage to some, whilst they cause loss to others. In the northern counties of Scotland, fish refuse is obtained in large quantities during the herring fishing season. On the coast of Cornwall, the pilchard fishing affords a large supply of refuse for composts."

In regard to the calving of cows, to milking, and to the rearing of calves, we have information as full, as minute, and as easily conveyed, as on any of the other subjects which have hitherto engaged our attention. When treating of the diseases to which cows, on calving, are subject, we have been interested with the following case: —

"I may here mention an unaccountable fatality which overtook a short-horn cow of mine, in Forfarshire, immediately after calving. She was an extraordinary milker, giving not less than thirty quarts a-day in summer on grass; but what was more extraordinary, for two calvings the milk never dried up, but continued to flow to the very day of calving, and after that event returned in increased quantity. In the third year she went naturally dry for about one month prior to the day of reckoning; every precaution, however, was taken that the milk should dry up without giving her any uneasiness. She calved in high health, the milk returned as usual in a great flush after calving, but it was impossible to draw it from the udder; not a teat would pass milk, all the four being entirely corded. Quills were first introduced into the teats; and then tubes of larger size were pushed up into the body of the udder. A little milk ran out of only one of them – hope revived; but it soon stopped running, and all the art that could be devised by a skilful shepherd proved unavailing to draw milk from the udder; rubbing and softening the udder with goose-fat, making it warmer with warm water – all to no purpose. To render the case more distressing, there was not a veterinary surgeon in the district. At length the udder inflamed, mortified, and the cow died in the most excruciating agony on the third day, from being in the highest state of health, though not in high condition, as her milking propensity usually kept her lean. No loss of the kind ever affected my mind so much – that nothing could be done to relieve the distress of an animal which could not help itself. I was told afterwards by a shepherd, to whom I related the case, that I should have cut off all the teats, and although the horrid operation would, of course, have destroyed her for a milk cow, she might have been saved for feeding. He had never seen a cow so operated on; but it suggested itself to him in consequence of having been obliged at times to cut off the teats of ewes to save their lives. The suggestion I think is good. The cow was bred by Mr Currie, when at Brandon in Northumberland."

Is there really no remedy for so distressing a case as this but that which his shepherd recommended? He might, for the benefit of his readers, have consulted our friend Professor Dick, whose opinions he so frequently and so deservedly quotes.

The following paragraph is very striking, as showing the cruel absurdities which ignorance will sometimes not only perpetrate, but actually establish, as a kind of custom in a country.

"Tail-ill or Tail-slip.– A very prevalent notion exists in Scotland amongst cattle-men, that when the tail of an ox or of a cow feels soft and supple immediately above the tuft of hair, there is disease in it; and it is called the tail-ill, or tail-slip. The almost invariable remedy is to make large incision with the knife along the under side of the soft part, stuff the wound full of salt and butter, and sometimes tar, and roll it up with a bandage for a few days, and when the application is removed, the animal is declared quite recovered. Now, this notion is an absurdity. There is no such disease as that imputed; and as the poor animal subjected to its cure is thus tormented, the sooner the absurd notion is exposed the better. The notion will not soon be abandoned by the cattle-men; but the farmer ought to forbid the performance of such an operation on any of his cattle without his special permission, and the absurd practice will fall into desuetude."

We have not space for the remainder of this paragraph, which contains Professor Dick's demonstration that no such disease exists as the so-called Tail-ill. Mr Stephens' narrations are more like a tale from the times of witchcraft, when old women were supposed to have the power of bringing disease upon cattle, than of those days of general enlightenment.

In sections 2268 and 2269, there is a recipe for making a cow which has once calved give a full supply of milk all the rest of her life, and which recipe is said to be infallible. This is a bon-bouche, however, which we shall leave our readers to turn up for themselves; and we hope the desire to learn it will induce many of our dairy friends to buy the book.

The following is the mode adopted in fattening calves at Strathaven, in Scotland, where the famous veal has been so long grown, chiefly for the Glasgow market: —

"Strathaven in Scotland has long been famed for rearing good veal for the Glasgow and Edinburgh markets. The dairy farmers there retain the quey calves for maintaining the number of the cows, while they feed the male calves for veal. Their plan is simple, and may be followed anywhere. Milk only is given to the calves, and very seldom with any admixture, and they are not allowed to suck the cows. Some give milk, but sparingly at first, to whet the appetite, and prevent surfeit. The youngest calves get the first drawn milk, or fore-broads, as it is termed, and the older the afterings, even of two or three cows, being the richest portion of the milk. After being three or four weeks old, they get abundance of milk twice a-day. They get plenty of dry litter, fresh air, moderate warmth, and are kept nearly in the dark to check sportiveness. They are not bled during the time they are fed, and a lump of chalk is placed within their reach. They are fed from 4 to 6 weeks, when they fetch from £3 to £4 a-piece; and it is found more profitable to fatten the larger number of calves for that time, to succeed each other, of from 25 lb. to 30 lb. per quarter, than to force a fewer number beyond the state of marketable veal."

The Caledonian Railway now puts this choice veal within the reach of English mouths; and we hope it will, at the same time, add to the prosperity and profits of the Strathaven breeders.

The lambing of ewes, the care of the mothers and offspring, the diseases to which they are subject, as well as the other operations which demand the farmer's care in the months of spring, we must pass by. We could go on commenting and quoting from this book, as we have already done, till an entire number of Maga was filled up. But as this would be preposterous, we stop, earnestly pressing upon our readers to place a copy of this storehouse of rural information in the hands of every practical husbandman, in whose professional skill they are at all interested.

Those who, like ourselves, take an interest in the diffusion of improved agriculture, scientific, and practical – and especially of our own agricultural literature in other countries – will be pleased to learn, not only that the work of which the title is prefixed to the present article, as well as the others upon agricultural chemistry to which we have referred, have made their way into the common stock of the book-stores of the United States, but that the editing of the American reprint of the second edition of the Book of the Farm has been undertaken by our friend Professor Norton, of Yale College, (may his shadow never be less!) so well known and esteemed in Scotland, where he obtained the Highland Society's £50 prize for a chemical examination of our native oat, which was published in their Transactions. He is a worthy representative of the "country of steady habits" to which he belongs; and we hope his countrymen will be discriminating enough to appreciate his own character and scientific labours, as well as the value of the books he undertakes to bring before them.

THE SYCAMINE

IThe frail yellow leaves they are fallingAs the wild winds sweep the grove;Plashy and dank is the sward beneath,And the sky it is gray above.IIFoaming adown the dark rocks,Dirge-like, the waterfallMourns, as if mourning for something gone,For ever beyond its call.IIISing, redbreast! from the russet spray;Thy song with the season blends:For the bees have left us with the blooms,And the swallows were summer friends.IVThe hawthorn bare, with berries sere,And the bramble by the stream,Matted, with clay on its yellow trails,Decay's wan emblems seem.VOn this slope bank how oft we layIn shadow of the sycamine tree;Pause, hoary Eld, and listen now —'Twas but the roaring of the sea!VIOh, the shouts and the laughter of yore —How the tones wind round the heart!Oh, the faces blent with youth's blue skies —And could ye so depart!VIIThe crow screams back to the wood,And the sea-mew to the sea,And earth seems to the foot of manNo resting-place to be.VIIISearch ye the corners of the world,And the isles beyond the main,And the main itself, for those who wentTo come not back again!IXThe rest are a remnant scatter'dMid the living; and, for the dead,Tread lightly o'er the churchyard mounds;Ye know not where ye tread!Δ

AFTER A YEAR'S REPUBLICANISM

The revolutionary year has almost closed; the anniversary of the days of February is at hand. A Year's Republicanism has run the course of its unchecked experience in France: to believe its own boast, it has ridden boldly forward, seated upon public and popular opinion, in the form of the widest, and, upon republican principle, the honest basis of universal suffrage; it has been left to its own full career, unimpeded by enemies either at home or abroad. And what has been the result of the race? – what has been the harvest which the republican soil, so carefully turned over, tilled, and manured, has produced?

It would be a useless task to recapitulate all the different stages of the growth of the so-called fair green tree of liberty, and enumerate all the fruits that it has let drop from time to time, from the earliest days of last spring, to the tempestuous summer month of June; and then, through the duller, heavier, and gloomy months of autumn, to those of winter, which brought a president as a Christmas-box, and which have shown a few scattered gleams of fancied sunshine, cold at the best, and quickly obscured again by thick-coming clouds of dis-accord, misapprehension, and startling opposition of parties. All the world has had these fruits dished up to it – has handled them, examined them, tasted them; and, according to their opinions or prejudices, men have judged their savour bitter or sweet. All that can be said on the subject, for those who have digested them with pleasure, is, that "there's no accounting for tastes." In calculating the value of the year's republicanism which France has treasured up in its history, it is as well, then, to make no further examination into the items, but to look to the sum-total as far as it can be added up and put together, in the present aspect of affairs. In spite of the openly expressed detestation of the provinces to the capital – in spite of the increasing spirit of decentralisation, and the efforts made by the departments to insure a certain degree of importance to themselves – it is still Paris that reigns paramount in its power, and as the influential expression, however false in many respects it may be, of the general spirit of the country. It is upon the aspect of affairs in Paris, then, and all its numerous conflicting elements, that observation must still be directed, in order to make a résumé, as far as it is practicable, of this sum-total of a year's republican rule. The account must necessarily be, more or less, a confused one, for accounts are not strictly kept in Republican Paris – are continually varying in their results, according as the political arithmeticians set about their "casting up" – and are constantly subject to dispute among the accountants: the main figures, composing the sum-total, may, however, be enumerated without any great error, and then they may be put together in their true amount, and according to their real value, by those before whom they are thus laid.

One of the most striking figures in the row, inasmuch as the lateness of the events has made it one of the most prominent, is to be derived from the position and designs of those who declare themselves to be the only true and pure republicans in the anomalous Republic of France, as exemplified by that revolutionary movement which, although it led to no better result than a révolution avortée, takes its date in the history of the Republic beside the more troublous one of May, and the more bloody one of June, as "the affair of the 29th of January." Paris, after the removal of the state of siege, had done its best to put on its physiognomy of past years, had smeared over its wrinkles as best it might, and had made sundry attempts to smile through all this hasty plastering of its poor distorted face. Its shattered commerce still showed many rags and rents; but it had pulled its disordered dress with decency about it, and set it forth in the best lights; it had called foreigners once more around it, to admire it; and they had come at the call, although slowly and with mistrust. It had some hopes of mending its rags, then, and even furbishing up a new fresh toilette, almost as smart as of yore; it danced and sang again, although faintly and with effort. The National Assembly clamoured and fought, it is true; but Paris was grown accustomed to such discordant music, and at most only stopped its ears to it: ministers held their portfolios with ticklish balance, as if about to let them fall; but Paris was determined not to care who dropped portfolios, or who caught them: there were clouds again upon the political horizon, and distant rumblings of a crisis-thunderstorm; but Paris seemed resolved to look out for fine weather. All on a sudden, one bright morning, on the 29th of January, the smile vanished: the troubled physiognomy was again there; the revolutionary air again pervaded it; and foreigners once more, not liking the looks of the convulsed face, began to start back in alarm. The rappel was again beaten, for the turning out of the national guards at the earliest hour of the morning: that drumming, which for many months had filled the air incessantly, again deafened sensitive ears and harassed sensitive nerves. The streets were thronged with troops, marching forwards in thick battalions; while before them retreated some hundreds of those nameless beings, who come no one knows whence, and go no one knows whither – those mysterious beings, peculiar to revolutionary cities, who only appear like a cloud of stinging dust when the wind of the revolution-tempest begins to blow, and who in Paris are either brigands or heroes of barricades, according as the language of the day may go – back, back, grumbling and threatening, into the faubourgs, where they vanished until the gale may blow stormier again, and meet with less resistance. The garden of the Tuileries was closed to the public, and exhibited an armed array once more among its leafless trees; the Champs Elysées had again become a camp and a bivouac; cannon was again posted around the National Assembly. Formidable military posts surrounded every public building; the streets were crowded with the curious; thick knots of men again stood at every corner; people asked once more, "What's on foot now?" but no one at first could answer: they only repeated from mouth to mouth the mysterious words of General Changarnier, that "he who should venture to displace a paving-stone would never again replace it;" and they knew what that meant. Paris was, all at once, its revolutionary self again; and, in some degree, so it remained during the ensuing weeks – with cannon displayed on hazardous points, and the great railway stations of the capital filled with battalions of soldiers, bivouacking upon straw in courts and salles d' attente; and huge military posts at every turn, and thick patrols parading gloomily at night, and palaces and public buildings closed and guarded, just as if retrograde monarchy were about to suppress fervent liberalism, and a "glorious republic" had not been established for a country's happiness wellnigh a year already; just as if republicans, who had conspired darkly a year before, had not obtained all they then clamoured for – a republic based upon institutions resulting from universal suffrage – and were conspiring again. And so it was. A deep-laid conspiracy – a conspiracy of republicans against a republic, which they chose to call deceptive and illusory – was again on foot. They had possessed, for nigh a year, the blessing for which they had conspired, intrigued, and fought; and they conspired, intrigued, and would have fought again. One of the figures, then, to form the total which has to be summed up as the result of a year's republicanism, is – conspiracy; conspiracy more formidable than ever, because more desperate, more bloody-minded in its hopes, more destructive in its designs to all society.

In spite of the denegations of the Red-republican party, and the counter-accusations of their allies the Montagnards in the Assembly, the question of all Paris, "What's on foot now?" was soon answered; and the answer, spite of these same denegations, and counter-accusations, was speedily understood and believed by all France. A conspiracy of the ultra-democrats, Red republicans and Socialists, (all now so shaken up together in one common dark bag of underhand design, that it is impossible to distinguish the shades of such parties,) was on the point of breaking out in the capital: the 29th of January had been fixed upon by the conspirators for their general insurrection. The Red republicans (to include all the factions of the anarchist parties under that title, in which they themselves rejoice, although the designation be derived from "blood") had felt how strong and overpowering had become the clamour raised throughout the land against that National Assembly which had run its course, and was now placed in constant opposition, not only to the president of the republic, as represented by his ministers, but to the general spirit and feeling of the country at large; they were aware, but too feelingly, that, should the Assembly give way before this clamour, in spite of its evidences of resistance, and decree its own dissolution, the elections of a new Legislative Assembly by that universal suffrage which had once been their idol, and was now to be scouted and despised, would inevitably produce what they termed a reactionary, and what they suspected might prove, a counter-revolutionary and monarchic majority; and they had determined, in spite of their defeat in June, to attempt another revolution, in the hope of again surprising the capital by a coup-de-main, and seizing the reins of power into their own hands at once. This conspiracy was affiliated together, in its various branches, by those formidable sociétés secrètes, which, long organised, had been again called into service by the persevering activity of the party, not only in Paris, but in all the larger provincial towns, and for which fresh recruits had been zealously drummed together. A general outbreak all over the country was regulated to explode simultaneously on the 29th of January, or during the following night: that monomania, which has never ceased to possess the minds of the frantic chiefs of the Red-republican party, and which still entertains the vain dream that, if they rise, all the lower classes, or what they call "the people," must rise at their call, to fight in their wild cause, gave them support in their designs. Pretexts for discontent, at the same time, were not wanting. The project of the government for a general suppression of the clubs – a measure which they declared unconstitutional, gave a colour to disaffection and revolt; and hopes that fresh allies would join the insurrection gave the party a bold confidence, which it had not possessed since the days of June. The garde mobile, in fact, had been tampered with. The spirit of these young janissaries of the capital, for the most part but a year ago the mere gamins de Paris, always vacillating and little to be relied upon, spite of their deeds in June, had already been adroitly worked upon by the fostering of that jealousy which subsisted between them and the regular army into a more decided hatred, when a decree of the government for the reorganisation of the corps was interpreted by the designing conspirators into an insult offered to the whole institution, and a preparatory measure to its total dissolution. Such insinuations, carefully fomented among these young troops, led to tumultuous demonstrations of disaffection and discontent. This ferment, so opportune for the designs of the Red republicans, induced them to believe that their hour of struggle and of approaching triumph was at hand: they counted on their new allies; all was ready for the outbreak. But the government was alive to the tempest rising around it; it was determined to do its duty to the country in preventing the storm, rather than in suppressing it when once it should have broken forth. Hence the military preparations which, on the morning of the 29th of January, had once more rendered all Paris a fortress and a camp; hence the warning sound of the rappel, which at an early hour had once more roused all the citizens from their beds, and called alarmed faces forth at windows and upon balconies in the gloom of the dawn; hence the stern commanding words of General Changarnier, and the orders to the troops and the national guards, that any man attempting to raise a stone from the streets should be shot forthwith, and without mercy; hence the consternation with which the outpost allies of the Red republicans hurried back growling to their mysterious dens, wherever such may exist. Prevention was considered better than cure, in spite of the misinterpretations and misapprehensions to which it might be exposed, and by which it was subsequently assailed by the disappointed faction. Arrest then followed upon arrest; upwards of two hundred of the suspected chiefs of the conspiracy were hurried off to prison. Among them were former delegates to the once famous committee of the Luxembourg, whose conduct gave evidence of the results produced by the dangerous utopian theories set forth under the lectureship of M. Louis Blanc, and his noble friend the soi-disant ouvrier Albert. Chiefs of the clubs bore them company in their incarceration; and the ex-Count D'Alton Shee, the ex-élégant of the fashionable salons of Paris, but now the socialist-atheist and anarchist, suffered the same penalty of his actions as leading member of the club "De la Solidarité Républicaine." Turbulent officers of the Garde Mobile underwent a similar fate. Even the national guard was not spared in the person of one of its superior officers, whose agitation and over-zealous movements excited suspicion; and, by the way, in the general summing up, arrest, imprisonment, restriction of liberty, may also take their place in the row as another little figure in the total.