on. These quantities constitute, no doubt,
a sufficient manuring to ordinary crops; but it appears to me to be
reversing the order of propriety, to give land under the severest
shift--a four-course one--the smallest modicum of manure, when it
should receive the largest; for there is surely truth in the
observation, that land grazed with stock becomes ameliorated in
condition--actually increased in fertility. A six-course shift,
therefore, having three years of grazing, should require less instead
of more manure even at a time than a four-course one on land of
similar quality."--(Vol. iii. pp. 1230, 1231.)

The chapter on the points of stock--cattle, sheep, pigs, and horses--would
of itself have afforded us materials for an interesting article. Breeding
and crossing of stock, both so necessary to be well understood by those
who would breed for _profit_, are also ably discussed by our author; and
it is only want of space which prevents us from quoting from this chapter.

But there are some kinds of live _cattle_ which of themselves breed too
fast even for Mr Stephens; and these he as anxiously instructs his readers
how to exterminate. Among these are rats, in regard to the destruction of
which the following passage will interest our readers:--

"Of all the modes I ever witnessed rats being killed, none equalled
that of a Yorkshireman, of the name of John Featherston, by means of
steel-traps. He had twenty-one small steel-traps, which he kept clean
and bright. He soon traced the tracks of rats along the floor to a
corner, or on the tops of walls, leading commonly by the corners of
apartments to the partition wall, which they surmounted between it
and the slates; the very place which I have recommended the filling
up, to break off such communications. After he had discovered the
different runs of the animals, he made a number of small firm bundles
of straw, which he placed against the bottom of a wall where the run
was on a floor, and upon its top where the run was to the roof. He
used seven traps at one place at a time, and a sufficient number of
bundles of straw was used to conceal that number of traps at each
place, employing the entire number of traps in three places, at a
little distance from each other, and in different apartments. The
traps were set, but not allowed to spring at first, and bait