FARMING PROPHECIES.
More than one almost portentous and needlessly mysterious prophecy was made last week at Rothamsted by Sir John Russell, just returned from a tour in Australia, and Professor Armstrong, on the occasion of showing the famous eighty- year-old agricultural plots to Lord Stradbroke and other distinguished guests. It is perhaps a little hard on our sorely tried farmers to promise them impending prosperity and.not to mention what the new secrets are. Sir John Russell, it seems, has a new formula discovered in Australia, and
Professor Armstrong a discovery that will soon enable this island to be self-sufficing in milk and meat. It _could, of
course, be self-sufficing in milk production at any time if the public would take a distaste for tinned milk ; and as things are it has produced not too little but too much. The actual facts are that the reform of marketing, now proceeding rapidly, and the rediscovery of the value of grass open new possibilities in the economic production of both milk and meat ; and it seems tolerably certain, though regrettable, that wheat-fields will continue to be fewer and sewer. The mere fact that varieties of wheat have recently been forind which will ripen hundreds of miles further north than the old will tend to increase the supply of wheat and so keep down the price.
W. BEACH THOMAS.
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