The mode of cropping in general practice is what is termed a _sixcourse shift_—the first year wheat; second, barley, with or without clover; third, turnips; fourth, barley or oates, with or without clover; fifth, clover mown for hay; sixth, grazed and ploughed up for wheat again. Some vary this mode by a five or a four course shift. Wheat is a general crop over the whole county, but thrives best on the stiff loamy lands. The lighter soils are favourable to barley, vast quantities of which are raised, malted, and in that state sent out of the county. Both wheat and barley are principally either drilled, for which several kinds of ingeniously-contrived _barrow-drills_ are used, or else planted with the hand by women and children, called _dibbling_. The latter is among the agricultural improvements that have originated in this county: it is very generally practised, and its superiority, in several respects, or circumstances, over the other methods has been generally admitted. The quantities produced, according to the seed sown, are very unequal in different parts of the county. Lands, in the hundred of Flegg and Marshland, usually bear six quarters of wheat per acre, and ten of oats; but in the very light soils, the farmer is glad to obtain two quarters of oats, and three of barley. The average crops of the whole county may be stated at three quarters of wheat, and four of barley, and other articles in proportion, per-acre. {139} Oats are mostly sown only as a shifting crop, and seldom more is raised than what are consumed within the county. Other crops are rye, buck wheat, peas, beans, vetches or tares, coleseed, clovers, rye and other artificial grasses; burnet; cocksfoot, chickary, cabbages, mangel wurzel, luzerne, carrots, and potatoes. The latter, though so valuable a root, and in other parts used as a preparatory crop for wheat, has not lately been adopted as a field course in Norfolk. {140a} _Flax_ and _hemp_, and even _mustard_ and _saffron_ are grown in some parts about Marshland and the Fens.—Improved implements and machines, to facilitate the operations of husbandry, are here in the greatest variety and perfection. _Threshing machines_ are become general throughout the county, as are also _drills_ of all kinds; but a _drill-roller_ has been supposed to be peculiar to Norfolk. It is a large cast-iron cylinder, with projecting rings round it, at about ten inches distance from each other. This being drawn over the ploughed land makes indentations, and the seed sown _broad-cast_ chiefly falls into the drills, and is thus regularly and better deposited than in the common mode of sowing.—Among _wheel-carriages_ the non descript one called a _wizzard_, or _hermaphrodite_, is curious and remarkable; it is the common cart, to which in harvest, or in pressing circumstances, a couple of temporary forewheels are placed under the shafts, and two oblique ladders to the frame, by which it is made to answer the purpose of a