COUNTRY LIFE
The Valuable Shire It is welcome to receive accumulating evidence that the Shire horse, most quiet, intelligent and powerful of horses, is not -going the way of the carriage horse. The tractor has not had the destructive influence of the road motor-car. A couple of good heavy horses are today worth as much as a light tractor in money, and the farmer buys them as well as the haulier. A farmer, with whom I stood watching the ploughs, said that he could not farm without the tractor ; but regarded it not so much as a rival to the horse as an aid. It did the work for which the horse was less well fitted. We reckoned that a three-furrowed plough behind a caterpillar tractor was covering the ground about four times as quickly as the horses, partly because of the time lost in turning horses at the headlands. Competitions in ploughing and in hedging are becoming a regular annual event under the leadership of the County Agricultural Institutes, of which Oaklands in Hertfordshire is one of the best. The horse and the tractor are usually seen side by side, but the local interest AS almost wholly concentrated on the pairs of horses.
Popular Rivals The Shire holds his own ; and all his supporters emphasise his cardinal virtue : no other heavy horse has such good feet ; and—ex pede Herculem : you know the powerful horse by his feet. Nevertheless other breeds now rival him. The Percheron has made great strides ; and even the fanciers begin to regret the .Shire's "feathers" which were once hailed as final evidence of his quality. The feathers have indeed more or less killed the export trade in Shires. Though they are indubitably evidence of other fine qualities, in themselves they gather mud and grease, and need more barbering than there is time to give them. If expert breeders could and would produce a more or less featherless sh;re, they would do a great service, though the fancier would be horrified: The .Shire in spite of his feathers and the curve in his back has essential qualities yet to seek in either Percheron or Suffolk Punch or the invaluable, more active Clydesdale: Car and Hackney The maleficent influence of the car on the hackney is lamented by Mr. James Agate in a very lively book of essays on cricket, boxing and golf (Kingdoms for Horses, Gollancz, 7s. 6d.) ; but he errs, I think, in one particular. The great popularity of the driving classes, especially of hackneys, at agricultural shows is a more or less new thing in certain aspects. It was emphasised very much at the date when the motor-car began to become overwhelmingly popular. At the date when the hackney more or less vanished from the roads and -When the Cleveland bay began quite to vanish before the threat, the hackney became a popular favourite, largely owing to Sir Gilbert Greenall, as he then was, and that energetic group of enthusiasts for the harness horse to whom the Olympia Show owed its origin. What rejoicing there was when a hackney-bred horse appeared in the steeple- chase and flew over the fences with all the ability of an Irish- bred hunter !
Intensive Oranges What contrasts farming presents-! An account of a citrons farm in California was given me as we watched the ploughing. The acres we looked at were worth at most some £30 each. A well-planted acre in California is worth 1700 and pays a good profit at that rate. Each tree is like a precious garden shrub. It is most carefully manicured, it has its own supply of water laid on ; ahd so runs little chance of any setback in the first five years of its life, after which, it may be said to be grown up. The sign of its maturity is that" all at once it refmes the skin of its fruit. The thick-skinned orange becomes thin-skinned and all is well. This ploughing of fields for grain-crops is perhaps the thinnest form of cultivation, though not so thin as on the wide wheat belts of the North American continent ; and the Californian farms for fruit and indeed vegetables are perhaps the most intensive if we omit cultivation under glass or for that matter in cellars: The Homing Sense
In a discussion on the mystery of the birds' sense of direct ion the old and unphilosophic theory of a " sixth sense " has been invoked. The phrase, of course, carries us no further as it stands, but it begins to acquire a more distinct meaning. This sixth sense is now held to be an ethereal sense, a per- ception not of aerial but of ethereal vibrations. The evidence is taken from several experiments made on the Continent at two radio stations. The activity of the transmitters has, for a while, so disturbed Homer pigeons that they have lost sense of their direction, but have recovered it when the wireless vibrations ceased. If these experiments should be corroborated the inference of a sixth sense is stronger than even its more ardent supporters claim, and for the following reason.
Homers v. Migrants The experiments have been made, not with migrating birds but with homing pigeons. Now every pigeon-racer will maintain that his birds learn by experience. The young birds have to be trained. They begin with short flights and are led on to larger flights. They quite certainly trust a great deal to sight ; and their sight, we know, is immensely long. Probably they excel that great Indian sportsman who was said to have such good eyes that he could see the stars in daylight. The Homer pigeon quite certainly uses senses and capacities of which we have cognizance, especially memory and eyesight. The skill of the bird has therefore in this regard little or no relation to the powers of the migrant bird. In some species, the cuckoo, for example, the young birds precede the old and presumably are as clever at finding their way to distant places of which they have laid no know- ledge. They are directed neither by memory nor by sight. If then the Homer pigeon, using these two capacities, is disturbed by ethereal vibrations, how very Much stronger an influence they should exert on the migrant, if it is relying on its sixth sense. At the same time it will help to clarity if the theorists will grant that the comparison of the Homer with the migrant is "a mere analogy" (as the old don said to Lewis Carroll). The pigeon dashing back to its loft has little likeness to the deliberate almost desultory autumn migrants now leaving our shores. The Homer is more like the dog or horse, or for that matter cow or pig, which knows the way hoine though carried from it blindfold. It is not a little remarkable that the most salient examples of home-finding mammals concern animals that have young ; and Mr. Lockley's Skok- holm experiments prove that birds with young, but not others, will return promptly to the home however far they may be carried. Strong desire itself seen:s to create a new sense. Perhaps what we call faith comes into the same category.
The Best Barberies It is the date when those lively shrubs the barberies—a prettier name than berbcris--come into their autumn glory, on those few gorgeous acres at Wisley as elsewhere. I believe that in America no flowering shrub (barring perhaps some purely hedge plants) has anything like the circulation of berberis thunbergi. Pretty well a quarter of a million are said to be sold annually. It is gorgeous, but the variety atropurpurea is more gorgeous still, as rhus cotinoides excels even rhus colinus. Preferences for species or varieties are individual : "I this thing, you that, whom shall my soul believe ?" Yet we like to know of other people's favour- ites. For myself out of a not very wide experience, a par- ticular charm attaches to Prallii—for habit and colour of both leaf and berry—and of the quaint white-stemmed dictyophyllum. Some of the nurserymen have a very wholesale method of multiplying these plants. I saw one line of bushes flattened and squashed into a supine position and the whole of the bush pegged down for layers, without the exception of a single branch. I suppose that no bush in existence is less pure or throws a greater variety than the berberis when multiplied by seed. On this subject I saw the other day in a Rectory garden several poles of ground covered with seedlings from one pure white dahlia. There was not a suggestion of whiteness in any one of the
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