farmyard manure is to make a heavy application of the same to the crop preceding the alfalfa. It has thus become incorporated with the soil, and many weed seeds in it will have sprouted before sowing the alfalfa. The results from applying manure on soil somewhat stiff and not highly productive have been noticeably marked. This may have been owing in part to the mechanical influence of the manure on the land. The relation between the free application of farmyard manure and abundant growth in alfalfa is so marked in all, or nearly all, soils west of the Mississippi River that in many instances better crops will be obtained from poor soils well manured than from good soils unmanured. The relation between abundant manuring and soil inoculation is worthy of more careful study, in the judgment of the author, than has yet been accorded to it. Fine pulverization of the surface soil is advantageous when sowing alfalfa, because of the influence which it has upon the retention of moisture near the surface, and upon the exclusion from the soil of an overabundance of light. It is in clay soils, of course, that this condition is most difficult to secure. The agencies in securing it are the cultivator, the harrow and the roller, and in many instances the influences of weather, after the land has been plowed, especially when plowed in the autumn prior to spring seeding. Moistness in the seed-bed sufficient to promptly sprout the seed is a prime essential, but it is very much more important where the seasons are dry than where the lack of rain is but little feared. When the seed is sown after summerfallow or cultivated crops, it is usually considered preferable to make the seed-bed without using the plow, but to this there may be some exceptions. If sowing is deferred for a few weeks in the spring on such lands, or on other lands autumn plowed or early spring plowed, a free use of the harrow ought to be made in the interval, because of the favorable influence which this will have on the retention of moisture. In preparing some soils for autumn sowing after a grain crop, as in some parts of Nebraska and Kansas, it is only necessary to use the harrow; in preparing others the disk and harrow; and in yet others the disk and harrow and roller. In preparing other soils, as the clays of the South, it may be necessary first to plow and subsoil, and subsequently to use sufficiently the harrow and roller.