to their assistance Messrs Watson, Dudgeon, Gibson, and the thirty agriculturists who certiorate their statements. What a host!--gathered together from the south and north, and east and west, all marshalled in warlike array, to put down Mr James Caird, farmer, Baldoon! Was there ever such a hallucination? or did human vanity ever take such a flight before? You think it proved, by the mustered troops that have been brought to bear upon you, that it is not the advocate but the cause which is inextinguishable. The cause, doubtless, is as inextinguishable as the Auchness potatoes. But who ever dreamed of the advocate as being indestructible? I never heard of you as the inextinguishable Mr Caird--the unconsumable Phœnix of the West. You are very distinguished, but not inextinguishable. Oh! dismiss the vain fancy, or intolerable ridicule will dog you all the days of your life. Can a man not write on British agriculture, and illustrate the depression of agricultural produce flowing from the invasion of Free Trade, without having Mr Caird in his eye? Or if I utter the words "high farming," must you instantly prick up your ears, and ask me snappishly, "Do you bite your thumb at me?" The idea of high farming being the substitute for protection was your own--but you neither invented, nor do you practise, the Auchness modes of husbandry. You were not the discoverer of the Auchness wonders; you were the cicerone, the mere narrator of them. You were not the man that caught the lion, but the gentleman with the long pole who describes to the gaping _gobemouches_ the qualities of the king of the beasts. Johnson had his Boswell, Addison his Tom Tickell, and Robinson Crusoe his man Friday; and there seems no reason why Mr M'Culloch should not have his Caird. But you quite over-estimate the importance of your position. _Blackwood_ spoke of you with a studied gentleness, as if unwilling to hurt your feelings; and _Blackwood's_ farmers make not the remotest reference to you, _and never once mention your name_. And yet, in your _High Farming Vindicated_, you pour out on these gentlemen an inky flood of petulant impertinence. You speak of their statistics as "counter-statements" (p. 7.) to yours. Your vanity makes you think so. They never once allude to you; and if the article in _Blackwood_ brought them to bear on the high farming theory, it might surely be the high farming of Mechi or Huxtable, as well as of Caird.