Excerpt from The Handy-Book of Husbandry: A Guide for Farmers, Young and Old I cannot claim such sublime originality for my present work; for while none of the operations of the farm are unfamiliar to me, and While I pro fess to be, by education and experience, a practical farmer, I have tried to tell in its pages not only what I have learned over my work, - which, in the case of any individual, is woefully little, - but also what I have gained from the recorded experience of other farmers, who have been accumulating, little by little for years and more, the precious sap of wisdom with which our tree of knowledge is fed. I have endeavored, too, to look beyond the farmer who has done so much for the unfolding of the riches that Nature, our universal mother, showers upon her industrious sons, and to question, as well, those devoted friends of the farmer, the chemist and the student, who ask from Nature something more than her material gifts, who seek the very cunning of her deft handicraft, who - not satisfied with the fact that she rolls up her bounty from seed-time until harvest - ask how her work is done; how the seed sprou'ts, the leaf shoots, the blossom unfolds, the fruit ripens how re newed life and vigor spring from death and decay; how fields are exhausted, and how made fertile; how crops are increased, and kine are grown; how from only air and earth and water such a marvel as man is made to live and move. I trust that my experience as a farmer has enabled me to separate, with tolerable completeness, the chaff from the wheat, or at least to select from the teachings of others (whether in the field or in the study, ) the infor mation that the farmer, as a farmer, will be most benefited by gaining. I have endeavored to forego all theorizing, and to state the leading facts of the art and of the science of farming as plainly and clearly as I could, so that any man who can read at all, and who has ordinary intelligence, may find my statements as free as possible from hard words, and that he may feel, as he goes along, that it is a brother farmer who is talking to him, and that what he is saying both his reason and his experience lead him to believe worth the telling. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.