The first object should be to destroy weeds. I do not know how it is in other sections, but with us the majority of farms are completely overrun with weeds. They are eating out the life of the land, and if something is not done to destroy them, even exorbitantly high prices can not make farming profitable. A farmer yesterday was contending that it did not pay to summer-fallow. He has taken a run-down farm, and a year ago last spring he plowed up ten acres of a field, and sowed it to barley and oats. The remainder of the field he summer-fallowed, plowing it four times, rolling and harrowing thoroughly after each plowing. After the barley and oats were off, he plowed the land once, harrowed it and sowed Mediterranean wheat. On the summer-fallow he drilled in Diehl wheat. He has just threshed, and got 22 bushels per acre of Mediterranean wheat after the spring crop, at one plowing, and 26 bushels per acre of Diehl wheat on the summer-fallow. This, he said, would not pay, as it cost him $20 per acre to summer-fallow, and he lost the use of the land for one season. Now this may be all true, and yet it is no argument against summer-fallowing. Wait a few years. Farming is slow work. Mr. George Geddes remarked to me, when I told him I was trying to renovate a run-down farm, “you will find it the work of your life.” We ought not to expect a big crop on poor, run-down land, simply by plowing it three or four times in as many months. Time is required for the chemical changes to take place in the soil. But watch the effect on the clover for the next two years, and when the land is plowed again, see if it is not in far better condition than the part not summer-fallowed. I should expect the clover on the summer-fallow to be fully one-third better in quantity, and of better quality than on the other part, and this extra quantity of clover will make an extra quantity of good manure, and thus we have the means of going on with the work of improving the farm. “Yes,” said the Doctor, “and there will also be more clover-roots in the soil.”