The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1854-03-14 00:00:00

EEVIEWS OF BOOKS.

Modern Husbandry ; a Practical and Scientific
Treatise on. Agriculture, and the general Ma-
nagement and Economy of the Farm. By G.
H. Andrews. London : Nathaniel Cooke.

In a modest preface, the author of this work
informs us that his intention in its publication is
to provide intelligible and really useful information
to practical farmers, and to amateur agriculturists,
who pursue husbandry on a moderate or small
scale ; and to supply such as those with an amount
of well-digested hints and directions which will
snit their circumstances, without trenching on the
province of those more elaborate treatises by which
the theory and practice of agriculture has of late
years been so successfully elucidated. In following
Gait this intention Mr. Andrews has been emi-
aently successful ; but the scope of his labours has
not by any means been so limited as would merely,
though fully, justify us in stating that his promise
had been fulfilled. On the contrary, he enters at
very considerable length into all the practical ques-
tions which bear directly on successful farming.
As the nature of the soil, in every situation where
they are carried on, exercises an important-influ-
ence on farming operations and their results, Mr.
Andrews commences with an elaborate, yet easily-
comprehended, chapter on what may be called the
geology of farming. Starting with a consideration
of soils and sub-soils, he leads his readers, by an
easy and interesting process, through the study of
alluvial soils, bogs, peats, and mosses ; discusses
t he underlying strata, and considers their relation
to draining, to cereal and other produce ; their
effects on stock, as to breeding, rearing, and feed-
ing ; and shows their immediate and remote rela-
tion to the general economy of the farm, and the
comfort as well as profit of the farmer. Having
briefly, yet clearly, explained these matters, he
next devotes his attention to the various tenures
under which land is held, and to the burdens which
are peculiar to its occupancy and cultivation. On
the subject of draining, he is at once comprehen-
sive and sensible, detailing with perspicuity the
different modes of draining pursued in various I
quarters, under different circumstances, and with
a view to opposite results, as these results are to
he affected by the nature of the locality, and the
intentions of the farmer. The choice of situation
for farm buildings occupies much of our author's
attention, but not more than its importance de-
mands ; and, in addition to mere situation, he
enters minutely into the details of building accom-
modation required on farms of various orders,
giving ground-plans and elevations of several
kinds of farm-steadings, including, of course, under
this head stables, cattle-sheds, piggeries, manure
tanks, thrashing and other machines, steaming
apparatus, &c., in addition to the dwelling of the
farmer, and the comfortable lodging of his ser-
vants. An excellent chapter is devoted to the
consideration of manures, and their modes of appli-
cation and results. All the matters enumerated,
it will be observed, are processes or means ante-
cedent to what, in strict language, may be termed
culture, although inseparably connected with it ;
on the subject of culture our author is explicit and
comprehensive, availing himsely freely of the pro-
mulgated experience of those who have devoted
their attention to particular branches of cultiva-
tion. Crops and their rotation, cattle and sheep
feeding, and the rearing of poultry as matters of
profit and of mere economy, as might have been
expected in such a work, are largely treated of,
and the best authorities on the various subjects
are either quoted or referred to. The volume,
which is a very handsomely got-up one, is pro-
fusely illustrated by engravings from well-executed
drawings of implements, apparatus, buildings, and
processes ; of delineations of the various breeds of
animals ; and it is, moreover, published at so cheap
a rate as to bring it easily within reach of all who
take an interest in agricultural studies, whether
that interest finds its fruition in a mere under-
standing of the various operations and results, or
in their practical development as an important
business of life. To the practical farmer it will be
found a valuable text-book ; to the amateur a
source of pleasing and rational amusement.

Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Edited by an English Churchman. London :
Henry G. Bohn.
The second volume of this edition of Gibbon's
great and greatly censured work has just been
issued, and in appearance and concomitants it
.jus-
tifies the professions made by its spirited publisher.
The text is reprinted verbatim from the authentic
work of the author, and, instead of being emascu-
lated and interpolated in the parts generally con-
sidered objectionable, their evil tendency is coun-
teracted by explanatory notes. The author is
allowed to speak for himself—to state his own case,
as it were—while counsel is heard in opposition to
his statements, and the sound deductions of Chris-
tian authorities are placed in juxtaposition with the
plausibilities of those superficial arguments by
which Christian institutions have been assailed.
The work now under consideration is to form one
of a new series to be denominated " Bohn's British
Classics," intended to comprehend the works of
Pope, Addison, Dryden, Goldsmith, Robertson,
Hume, and others ; in all of which Mr. Bohn
pledges himself to the production of an unmuti-
lated text, carefully collated from the best standard
copies of the respective authors. It was but the
other day we took occasion to refer to Addison as
the great founder of our cheap periodical litera-
ture ; we now have satisfaction in recalling to
memory that Mr. Bohn has been the pioneer in the
cheap reprints of standard works, and that to his
enterprise and correct judgment the public is
indebted for cheap editions of many, very many
works of sterling excellence, which, but for his
spirited exertions, would in all probability have
remained exclusively in possession of the opulent,
and have been known only to the recluse..

Blackwood's Magazine. Edinburgh :
Blackwoods.

The high reputation of this magazine is well
sustained in the number for the present month,
several of the articles in wkich are entitled to
serious consideration, as conveying much valuable
mid interesting information. It opens with a
withering exposure of the attack on Mr. Disraeli,
in a recently published anonymous biography.
Some of our Radical contemporaries are grievously
irate at the epithets which the reviewer applies to
the anonymous assailant, but the real grievance is
that they are well deserved, and the champion of
truth and honour has expressed himself in intelli-
gible Saxon. In the continuing part of " The
Quiet Heart," the story is further developed, in
that peculiar quaint style which lends a charm to
such descriptions. The most interesting article is,
perhaps, the one entitled " The Russian Church,
and the Protectorate of Turkey." The 'writer
enters at some length into the question of the
pretended orthodoxy ofhi the Greek Church in Rus-
sia, and thus sums up s argument :
"We were desirous of showing, first, that the homo-
geneity of the Russian and Eastern Churches, on which
the Czar lays his strongest
.claim to the protectorate he
demands, has no foundation m fact,.andse that theprot protection
communities on which he would
deny the orthodoxy of his faith, and his
regard him as the
usurper of spiritual power; second, that the doctrines of
the Synod of St. Petersburg are denounced by Russia' ns
themselves, and the establishment opposed hy
is •,a formi-
dable sectarianism, and that that Church itself rather
in a condition to require protection against its internal
enemies than to afford it to others; third, that even !up-
Posing the Russian and Eastern Churches to be identical,
the
temporal protectorate in question would, in consequence of
temla°ral privileges preserved by the Patriarch of Con-
*.tantinople, as already noticed, be the positive introduc-
tion of a dangerous foreign influence in the domestic ad-
ministration of the Ottoman empire, and that the Sultan
would thereby Imo= the venal- of, the Czar; fourth,