Doomed Bracken
There are many ways of earning the blessing invoked by Dean Swift on the head of him who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before. Captain Holt has dis- covered one of the best ways ; he has made cheap and easy an effective way of killing one of the worst enemies of grass—and of sheep—the lovely but pestilential bracken. Some years ago he invented a machine of the simp!est nature which breaks and crushes the plant. This has now been improved and is likely to earn golden opinions. A good deal of research work has been done both by the mechanic and the botanist ; and it is found that the bruising of the young and juicy and vulnerable stems of the fern is more effective than mowing, partly because it creates, so to say, a seed-bed for the spores of a fungus growth that is one of the bracken's natural enemies. Bracken is to many British pastures very much what the prickly pear is, in its larger scale, to Australian grazings, and it encourages the additional sin of nursing the flies that are the worst enemies of sheep and of man. * * * *
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