When _green crops_ are to be employed for enriching a soil, they should be ploughed in, if it be possible, when in flower, or at the time the flower is beginning to appear, for it is at this period that they contain the largest quantity of easily soluble matter, and that their leaves are most active in forming nutritive matter. Green crops, pond weeds, the paring of hedges or ditches, or any kind of fresh vegetable matter, requires no preparation to fit them for manure. The decomposition slowly proceeds beneath the soil; the soluble matters are gradually dissolved, and the slight fermentation that goes on, checked by the want of a free communication of air, tends to render the woody fibre soluble without occasioning the rapid dissipation of elastic matter. When old pastures are broken up, and made arable, not only has the soil been enriched by the death and slow decay of the plants which have left soluble matters in the soil; but the leaves and roots of the grasses living at the time, and occupying so large a part of the surface, afford saccharine, mucilaginous, and extractive matters, which become immediately the food of the crop, and the gradual decomposition affords a supply for successive years. [_Davy's Agric. Chem._ ESSAY ON AGRICULTURE. The judicious and increasing attention of our citizens to agricultural pursuits, must be regarded, by every enlightened friend of his country, as among the happiest presages of its future prosperity. Agriculture, the most ancient and useful of the arts, the inseparable companion, if not the parent, of civilization, is rapidly obtaining that rank in public estimation, to which its intimate connexion with the cardinal interests of every well regulated community gives it so unquestionable a claim. The absurd prejudice, which has associated the cultivation of the soil with the idea of an ignoble servitude, is fast disappearing under the influence of milder systems of government, and has already ceased to operate on minds having the least pretensions to discrimination or enlargement of view.--The Patriarch of the human race was commanded by his Creator to "_replenish the earth, and to subdue it_;" we may, therefore, infer, that a limited attention to agriculture was among the happy employments of Adam, in the days of primeval innocence.