co-operate for the sale of his own produce. There are several thriving Societies in the Principality for cooperative buying; they purchase coal, seeds, manures, and machinery on advantageous terms because they can buy in bulk, but when it comes to selling produce, farmers refuse to combine, for the simple reason that they do not want their neighbours to know what they get for their produce. A Welsh farmer will starve before he will talk and his reticence goes to extraordinary lengths. I was told of a man who took a cow and a calf to market and asked six of his neighbours who had done the same thing what price they had been able to secure. The answers were typical. 'I did not do so badly.' 'Not as much as I expected,' 'I was quite satisfied.' 'It is a poor trade.' 'It might have been worse.' 'I'm not complaining.' There was not one man among them who would tell his neighbour what the price was, in order to give him a little guidance when the dealers came to make an offer. The result of their reticence and unintelligent conservatism is and has been for some years past, ever since the War in fact, that the Welsh farmers are working for the dealers, just as their wives are working for the higglers, and these two classes are taking the greater part of whatever profit farming in Wales has to offer. The astonishing thing is that in spite of these difficulties the instinct of the countryman is towards the farm all the time. It is only here and there, in counties like Glamorgan, that men are drawn to the mines, or, in others, such as Carnarvon, the boys take to the sea; in one case the high profits of good times and in the other case the romance must account for these departures from the ordinary rule of life. Not only do men seek the land but those who are engaged in other work like to have some association, however shadowy, with agriculture. Thus we find in the north that the quarrymen of Bethesda will have a cow or two and a little grazing ground for it, if it be but a gait on the hillside; when the agricultural organiser visits a remote quarry-side village to lecture on clean milk or some other agricultural topic, he will find that instead of an audience of a dozen or a score, there are fifty or more, and that most of them have been working underground, and are spending their leisure in learning something about the pursuit that comes nearest to their ☑ hearts. The thirst for agricultural knowledge is to be found in many parts of Wales; in some counties it is associated with a very definite pursuit of general culture. In the wilds of Merionethshire, for example, 50 per cent. of the lads who go to the county continuation classes are on their way to the farms, but they cling to education, and the lecturer who travels in some comfort to remote villages in the harshest of winter weather will find dozens of lads who have tramped over the hillsides under heavy rain after a hard day's work, in order to gather a little learning. Even when they go on to the farms and take up their life task as agricultural labourers they will give what leisure comes their way to the further search for knowledge. Some of them, said one who has done a considerable amount of teaching, are at heart poets and others have a distinct gift of expression in prose; many have acquired some classical knowledge, and the life on the land does nothing to blunt their interest in it. On all sides the standard of agricultural intelligence seems high until we come to the farmer and his wife, who persist in allowing the dealer and the higgler to filch their profits. 14 1 It is a hopeful sign that here and there one finds a Young Farmers' Club where all these questions of cooperative endeavour are being discussed eagerly, and the farm schools of Wales offer extraordinary advantages to students for a nominal cost. Some of the figures at Institutes like the Monmouthshire Institution at Usk, the Denbighshire Institute at Llysfasi, and the Carnarvonshire Farm School, Madryn Castle, are worth setting out because it will be seen that the facilities offered to boys and girls are of the most tempting kind. The Monmouthshire Institution is endowed with a part of the surplus funds of the William Jones Charity, and gives students who are resident in the county twentytwo weeks of board, lodging, and tuition for 15l., while those from other areas must pay 32l. 10s. There are two terms, each of twenty-two weeks, and for an additional 10s. medical attendance is provided throughout the year. Llysfasi Farm Institute holds two winter terms of eight weeks between October and March for men, and two summer terms, from mid-April to the third week in August, for women. The charge for county students for sixteen weeks is 16l., and for those coming from outside the county 20l. Madryn Castle gives a twenty-week course to county students for 17l. 10s. inclusive, those outside the county pay 25l. The summer course of dairy instruction between April and July costs residents ten guineas, the others pay 15l. It will be seen that the charges for board, lodging, and tuition are extraordinarily low, but neither in the point of food nor accommodation is anything lacking. The rooms are light and airy, and there is just sufficient discipline to maintain order, students and professors being on the most friendly terms. The youngest of the Farm Institutes, Pibwrlwyd, near Carmarthen, promises an equal utility and success. When we remember that these attractive Institutions are of very modern foundation, and that some of them have already sent out hundreds of trained men and women, it is clear that an era of change is pending, and that in no distant future a generation will take charge that knows whence evil comes, and will bring new ideas and fresh energy to the task of coming into line with modern thought and teaching. In this connexion great work is being done by the University of Wales, and the writer visited two of its most important colleges, Aberystwyth and Bangor. At the first named Prof. Stapledon is carrying out a monumental work that will affect not only Wales but all the land of high rainfall in Great Britain and the Empire, that is to say, it will touch Scotland and south-west England, as well as Wales and parts of Tasmania and New Zealand on the outposts of the Empire. His task is to breed the pedigree grasses that will endure far longer than the commercial mixtures and will develop a much bigger leaf and consequently an increased nutrient value. The work has been going on for ten years, and in another four or five years the new seeds will be on the market as a commercial proposition. Then those bleak mountainsides of Wales and Scotland, to say nothing of Devon and elsewhere, can be supplied with herbage that will grow freely and richly, giving maintenance to a far larger flock of sheep or head of cattle than may be found to-day. It should be possible later on, by arranging the breeding season, to have lambs all through the year, to bring beef into condition several months earlier than is possible at present without concentrated food, to maintain a larger dairy herd upon a smaller grazing area, and in short, to revolutionise the whole of the grass-land position in these islands. Already some remarkable results have been achieved and many important lessons learned. To give but one example. The failure of our red clover crop, a fairly frequent occurrence in these islands, has been traced to the lack of pollination by two species of humble bee (hortorum and agrorum), the only bees that can do this special work, and for breeding purposes Prof. Stapledon keeps his red clovers in bee-proof cages and only admits these two favoured species to pollinate them. In order to encourage the right humble bees he grows woodsage, their favourite flower, and provides nesting boxes. He has even been able to devise means of protecting the grasses that are pollinated by the wind, and the time will come when every farmer will be able to purchase a seed mixture that will respond to his actual needs while, when it deteriorates, as it must, below a certain standard of purity, he will be able to renew it from headquarters where nothing but pedigree seeds are raised. The old careless mixtures will become a thing of the past and the possibilities of stock-raising amplified beyond the limits of normal imagination. An agricultural survey of the whole Principality is being undertaken by Prof. Robinson of Bangor University, and in time to come the nature of all the soil will be known, so that its possibilities, whether for grass or corn production, feeding or haying, will be ascertained to a nicety. In the meantime one of the worst troubles of the Welsh sheep farmer, a trouble that has touched his English brother too, has been overcome. The disease known as fluke, that affects sheep so badly, is becoming a thing of the past. The liver fluke (Distomum hepaticum) takes up its abode in the bile ducts of the sheep and causes liver rot. Dr Montgomerie of Bangor has found a cure, a simple dose of one cubic centimetre of carbon tetrachloride. This dose kills all the big flukes, and repeated a few weeks later kills the immature ones that have developed to a point at which they are susceptible to the lethal dose. He has also discovered a serum that cures white scour in lambs, and with these two diseases removed, so to speak, from the map, the path of the sheep farmer has been smoothed considerably. In North Wales alone in the year 1922, 200,000 sheep and lambs fell victims to liver fluke, and in our own country from time to time the mortality is very heavy; for many years the nation's loss was reckoned in millions. So far as white scour is concerned, it makes no more than a sporadic appearance in Wales, and is more common in England, but all the work that is being done by the two universities has its reflex benefits on English farming, just as the research that Sir Rowland Biffen and Prof. Wood carry on at Cambridge and Mr Orwin and his colleagues at Oxford helps the Welsh farmer. The men who are concerned with all branches of agricultural work are satisfied, and with reason, that they are working on the right lines, and that time will justify their efforts, but those who are in touch with the farmer and his problems feel sometimes that while grass is growing the horse must starve, and they urge with some force the justification that agricultural science has moved far in advance of agricultural practice. 'It is hopeless,' said one leading authority to the writer, 'for us to help the farmer to keep more sheep on his hill and more cows on his pastures; it is useless for us to advise him to spend more money on manures and to make a real effort to drain his land, to put up buildings that will comply with the Milk and Dairies Order or to improve his seed mixtures, so long as his increased production yields no profit to him. I should like to see a halt called to every University activity and to every training college course while men and women of capacity and good will united in a big effort to solve our main problem-salesmanship. The more milk we produce the richer the combine that handles it, the more cattle that leave the farmers' yards the wealthier the dealer, the more lambs that go to the great markets of London, Manchester, and Salford the bigger the middleman's profits. The farmer is ground down to subsistence level all the time and his improvements yield nothing because whatever their benefit it does not come home to him.' This, of course, may be an extreme statement, but |