We back the oatcake and the porridge against all the wheaten messes in the world. We defy your homemade bread, your baker's bread, your household bread, your leaven bread, and your brown Georges--your fancy bread and your raisin bread--your baps, rolls, scones, muffins, crumpets, and cookies--your bricks, biscuits, bakes, and rusks--your Bath buns and your sally luns--your tea-cakes, and saffron-cakes, and slim-cakes, and plank-cakes, and pan-cakes, and soda-cakes, and currant-cakes, and sponge-cakes, and seed-cakes, and girdle-cakes, and singing-hinnies--your short-bread and your currant-buns--and if there by any other names by which you designate your wheaten abominations, we defy and detest them all. We swear by the oatcake and the porridge, the substantial bannock and the brose--long may Scotland produce them, and Scotchmen live and fight upon them!!
"The first great event in spring on a farm of mixed husbandry," says Mr Stephens, "is the calving of the cows." He then describes the symptoms, the preparations, and the treatment of the cow and the calf, the diseases to which they are respectively liable, and the treatment to which they ought to be subjected, in his usual clear, methodical, and remarkably complete manner. We have been struck with the kind tone which pervades the whole of this chapter, the gentle treatment he prescribes in all cases--indicating at once a practical acquaintance with the details of these operations, and a love also for the quiet and patient animals of which he is treating.
We should have quoted, had the passages not been too long, his description of the different modes adopted, apparently with equal profit, by the veal manufacturers for the London and Glasgow markets respectively. We should like to know the comparative profit of the French mode of feeding calves for the Paris market, _on cream and biscuits_. In his next edition, we hope Mr Stephens will instruct us upon this point also.
It is one of the merits of this book, and in our estimation a very high one, that method, order, and economy of time and labour are invariably recommended and insisted upon, in every process and at every season. But these points are especially insisted upon in his chapter _on the advantages of having field-work always in a forward state_. The following extract is long, but it contains such admirable advice, that we insert it for the sake of those who may never see the book itself, or have an opportunity of buying it.