On a recent visit to Dorsetshire, on our own farm, we saw a man employed to “keep the birds” from a field where several labourers were engaged barley sowing; and it is quite true that, unless he had been there, the rooks would have as industriously followed the drill as they do the plough; but, as we thought, scarcely to pick up barley in the breeding season, when there was metal more attractive in the recently-hatched _Elater obscurus_, parent of the wireworm, which were thicker than we ever saw them before, and, doubtless, the disturbance of the soil brought these and two or three generations of wireworms to the surface. Now, we do not hesitate to give as our opinion that this birdkeeper would have done more good to the barley and the succeeding clover crop by picking up a hundred or two of these beetles and destroying them than by blazing away at rooks for a twelvemonth, and this certainly might have been done in an hour or two. Still, that some soils do get incapable of growing a clover crop is pretty certain; and it may, we think, be equally settled that this does not entirely depend upon their having been exhausted of the ingredients which analysis demonstrates clover to contain, for we certainly have seen clover succeed after the burning of so-called clover-sick land; and though there is reason to think that this result was partially due to the setting free of a fresh supply of manurial ingredients, we are still convinced that the burning out of humus or peaty vegetable matter and the destruction of insects had their share in the induced change. Still, however much we may suppose that the failure of the clover crop is influenced by the alteration of its constitution as the result of cultivation, the presence of choking weeds, or by the presence of prejudicial ingredients, especially in thin soils, there can be no doubt that the principal cause of the difficulty will be found in the fact that the corn crop with which the clover is grown exhausts the soil, in the most unsparing manner, of the very chemical ingredients which the clover requires. Thus, if sheep are folded on a crop of turnips, the whole of this crop is converted into a manure at once available for the grain crop, by which it is quickly appropriated and then taken away. Here, then, we may suppose at starting that the clover is half starved; and, with a constitution drawn up in the effort of the plants to obtain a glance of sunshine, and weakened for the want of nourishment, it is expected to bear our inclement winters. This argument will be made all the clearer if we place side by side the result of the analyses of barley and clovers, and especially if we consider what a quantity of mineral matter is taken in a short time, and by a crop ripening its straw and seed.