There is an old story of a man, who, having a very stony field, determined to experiment on the value of these stones in the growth of his crops. With this view he divided his field into three equal parts. From No. 1 he gathered all the stones, which he spread upon No. 3, leaving No. 2 in its original condition. He then sowed barley over the whole field, and carefully noted the results. The story ends by saying that No. 1 bore a miserably poor crop, No. 2 a tolerable one, and No. 3 a splendid one. I quote this story as a text on which I wish to speak as to the advantage of gravelling heavy clay soils. Some weeks since I spent a few days at the village of Milnthorpe, in Westmoreland, and during one day with Mr. Hutton, the celebrated bone-setter, I remarked that the land was very stony, being covered with stones (not pebbles) having very much the appearance of road metal. He replied, that these stones were essential to the fertility of the soil, and said that some years before there was a great demand for such material in the neighbourhood of Preston, and the high prices stimulated the farmers to gather these stones from their land, and send them to Preston; but the consequences were so injurious to the growth of their crops, that they were compelled--at least those who had the means of doing so--to lead stones again upon their land before their crops would grow again with the vigour which they had before the stones were abstracted. This brought to mind what had occurred in my own farm practice. A church was built in the neighbourhood, and the stones for it were hewn on the corner of a field which was afterwards sown with wheat, and I remarked that the straw was much brighter, the ripening was forwarded ten days, and the sample was much better where the stones had been hewn than elsewhere in the field. (The stones of which the church was built were of ordinary sandstone, probably millstone grit.) Borrowing from this hint, I had the field covered with about 400 cartloads of alluvial gravel (from the bed of the river) to the acre, and the land was then ploughed two furrows deep, one plough following the other. Previous to this gravelling, the land was a stiff, obdurate clay nearly to the surface. The subsequent effect was the doubling, or more probably trebling the value of the land, which has now become a nice friable soil.