r
folding sheep. This, at first sight, might look to a practical
farmer a little extravagant, indicating a city origin, or the notion
of an amateur agriculturist, more ambitious of the new than of the
necessary. Each length of this iron fencing is apparently about a
rod, and cost 1 pound, or nearly five dollars. It is fitted to low
wheels, or rollers, on an axle two or three feet in length, so that
it can be moved easily and quickly in any direction. It would cost
over fifty pounds, or two hundred and fifty dollars, to enclose an
acre entirely with this kind of hurdling. Still, Mr. Mechi would
doubtless be able to show that this large expenditure is a good
investment, and pays well in the long run. The folding of sheep for
twenty-four or forty-eight hours on small patches of clover,
trefoil, or turnips, is a very important department of English
farming, both for fattening them for the market and for putting the
land in better heart than any other fertilising process could
effect. Now, a man with this iron fencing on wheels must be able to
make in two hours an enclosure that would cost him a day or more of
busy labor with the old wooden hurdles.

On the whole, a practical farmer, who has no other source of income
than the single occupation of agriculture, would be likely to ask,
what is the realised value of Alderman Mechi's operations to the
common grain and stock-growers of the world? They have excited more
attention or curiosity than any other experiments of the present
day; but what is the real resume of their results? What new
principles has he laid down; what new economy has he reduced to a
science that may be profitably utilised by the million who get their
living by farming? What has he actually done that anybody else has
adopted or imitated to any tangible advantage? These are important
questions; and this is the way he undertakes to answer them,
beginning with the last.

About twenty years ago, he inaugurated the system of under-draining
the heavy tile-clay lands in Essex. Up to his experiment, the
process was deemed impracticable and worthless by the most
intelligent farmers of the county. It was more confidently decried
than his present irrigation system. The water would never find its
way down into the drain-pipes through such clay. It stood to reason
that it would do no such thing. Did not the water stand in the
track of the horse's hoof in such rich clay until evaporated by the
sun? It