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Show HOME AND FARM. THERE are five pounds of pure sulphur every 100 pounds of wool. CARROTS consume 197 pounds of lime to an acre; turnips but 70 pounds. A CUBIC foot of common arable land will hold 40 pounds of water. IT takes 5 pounds of corn to form one of beef. Three and a half pounds of cooked meat will form one of pork. TO add one per cent of lime to a soil that is destitute of it, requires 10 tons of slaked lime, or six of caustic, to the acre. CLAY will permanently improve any soil that is sandy or leachy. Lime and leached ashes will also benefit leachy land. A TON of dry forest leaves produces only 500 pounds of mold, hence, 500 pounds of mold will produce a ton of plants. TEXAS ranks third among the wool producing states, having 8,674,000 sheep, and so treading closely on the heels of Ohio. California leads, of course. ?? county, Texas, has more sheep on its ?? than any other county in the Union-656,000. HOW TO ESTIMATE CROPS PER ACRE-Frame together four light sticks, measuring exactly a foot square inside, and with this in hand, walk into the field, and select a spot of fair average yield, and lower the frame square over as many heads as it will enclose, and shell out the heads thus enclosed carefully, and weigh the grain. It is fair to presume that the product will be the ?? part of an acre's produce. To prove it, go through the field, and make similar calculations, and estimate by the mean of the whole number of results. It will certainly enable a farmer to make a closer calculation of what his field will pro-produce, than he can do by guessing. THUNDER AND MILK-The Italia Agricola writing on the effect of thunder storms on milk, states that it is generally accepted belief that it is the lightning and electrical phenomena that accompany a thunder storm which cause the spontaneous coagulation of milk. Dr. Mallcorn wished to test the idea, and for the purpose he filled a cylinder with fresh skimmed milk, introduced into the same 100 cubic centimetres of pure oxygen, and then allowed electrical sparks to pass into the apparatus for the space of ten minutes, by means of the Ruhinborff machine. The milk quickly coagulated, clearly proving that an acid reaction had taken place, and after twenty minutes a firm cheese was produced. THE following is given as a correct rule for measuring corn in the crib. Multiply the length by the breadth, and this product by the depth of corn in the pen. Multiply this again by 4 ½, and point off one decimal place. This result will be the answer in bushels. For instance, we have pen of corn 48 feet long, 7 ½ feet wide and 8 ½ feet high. Multiplying these three dimensions together, we have 8,000 cubic feet. Now multiplying this by 4 ½ we hav 18,770. Pointing off the one decimal, we have, as the contents of the pen, 1,877 bushels. BANANAS-Few people who see bananas hanging in the shops of fruit dealers think of them as more than a tropical luxury. The fact is, they are a staple article of food in some parts of the world, and, according to Humboldt, an acre of bananas will produce as much food for a man as twenty five acres of wheat. It is the ease with which bananas are grown that is the great obstacle to civilization in some tropical countries. It is so easy to obtain a living without work that no effort will ever be made, and the men become lazy and shiftless. All that is needed is to stick a sucker into the ground, and it will at once sprout and grow, and ripen its fruit in twelve or thirteen months without further care, each plant having from 75 to 125 bananas; and, when that dies down from fruiting, new suckers spring up to take its place. In regions where no foot ever reaches bananas are found in all stages of growth, ripening their fruit every day and every month in the year.-Scientific American. THE CANKER WORM-To find the eggs that will produce a crop of canker worms on the apple long before a crop of apples can be secured, the Massachusetts Ploughman says: "Look near the ends of the twigs for little round bracelets of eggs, which seem to be glued on, as they actually are. These will bring out a swarm of your apple trees early in May. On small trees, in a young orchard, it is less work to look after, and remove them in this form than it is to fight them after they are hatched. The eggs of the canker worm are found near the departure of the smaller branches, in little round patches. They look very similar to those of the caterpillar, but do not extend in bracelets around the twig. There is little difficulty in finding and removing them on small trees that are infested with these insects. A good many of the canker worms were left on the ground unhatched last fall. It will be time for them to come out of the ground in about ten days, and begin to ascend. |