The Handy-Book of Husbandry: A Guide for Farmers, Young and Old
By , of Ogden Farm. Illustrated. (Sold by subscription.) New York : E. B. Treat & Co.
WE own that we praise Mr. Waring’s book without any of that practical knowledge of farming which has enabled him to write it; but we cannot carry our candor to the vicious excess of pretending ignorance of the very obvious merits of the book, namely, its clear, straightforward method, its sensible style, and its wholesome limitations in matters of theory and advice. The spirit of the work is revealed in a passage of the Preface, which we shall do it the service to quote, and which we think will put every one in good-humor with it: —
“ It is sad to look back to the days when Agriculture ’ was a rosy future with me ; when my work was done with the regularity and precision of clock-work by cheap and respectable farm hands; when my crops were all large and my cattle were all fat ; when an analysis of my soil, and a chemical ledgeraccount with each field, kept fertility at the top mark ; and when the balance-sheet at the end of the year was always adding to my fortune, — and then to bring my sobered gaze down over the hillside of hard realities that ended in a plain of simple ' Farming,’ of humdrum hard work, dear labor, scant manure, small crops, bad markets, sick animals, and— the least in the world —a sick heart ; with ‘ soil analysis ’ an ignis-fatuus, and nothing but patience and toil and skill and experience and hard study to take its place. I make no complaint of my disappointment, for even the harder experiences of life are not without their advantages, — when they are past, — but the hope that I might turn the steps of other young farmers into pleasanter paths was not the least of my motives in writing this book.”
From a farmer who writes in this spirit, it is probable that his brother-farmers will get an amount of good sense about their vocation that is seldom talked to them, or that, saving their respect, they are apt themselves to talk about it; for Mr. Waring has in his own case overcome the prejudices of the practical farmer and the enthusiasm of the book-farmer, and has reconciled the experience of the first with the ideas of the last.
The scope of the book is sufficiently great. It treats of buying and leasing farms, of fencing, buildings, and implements, of drainage, ploughing, and trenching, of manures and rotation of crops, of stock of all kinds and their management, and of the dairy in all its departments ; and each of these particulars is discussed in the same temper as characterizes the passage we have quoted from the Preface. Just how much Mr. Waring’s advice upon any one point is worth, the nearest farmer would be better able to say than the present critical authority ; but in all modesty, we can assure that farmer, from a pretty wide conversation with recent literature, that Mr. Waring does not write in the least like a quack ; whereas, and we are open to correction if wrong, many agricultural authors do. Farming seems, indeed, to have been the science destined, after medicine, to evoke the greatest charlatanry and pretence ; and now, if we may judge from the general tone of Mr. Waring’s book, it is destined like medicine to return with an enlightened intelligence to the use of simples, and a system of wise and careful nursing.