character—rather a sharp flint-gravel, somewhat under the average quality of the district. The whole has been more or less chalked from below, according to the custom of this county. The fertility of the farm is maintained, not by selling off the produce and trusting to London and other extraneous sources for an equivalent, but by developing and trusting to its own internal resources. The following list of animals fatted and sold from the farm has been kindly furnished in illustration of the system pursued:—
| 1862. | 1863. | |||||
| Lambs | 391 | 392 | ||||
| Sheep | 333 | 356 | ||||
| Beasts | 6 | 5 | ||||
| Calves | 45 | 50 | ||||
| Pigs | 205 | 198 | ||||
| Total head | 980 | 1001 |
On 317 acres of land.
The system of cropping is four-course, managed with especial reference to sheep-stock. Much reliance is placed on the deep cultivation of the soil, which is principally effected by the use of a two-wheeled plough, divested of its mould-board, which follows the first plough, armed with a share copied from that of the unwieldy and disused old Hertfordshire plough. Besides the usual succession crops of swedes, mangold, mixed layers, tares (to be followed by white turnips), it is the practice here to sow rape between the rows of beans on the heavier portion of the farm.
A certain portion of the ewe flock, which averages 330 head, consists of Dorsets, which are put to a Sussex or half-bred ram; both ewe and lamb are generally fatted for sale, and the stock replenished from fairs.
The Chalk District.
The Northern or chalk district, having a fall anticlinal to the dip of the stratum, is drained by streamlets which are the affluents of the Cam, the Ouse, and, in one instance, of the Thame.
This remarkable tract of land may be surveyed looking from Sandon, which stands high on a rounded escarpment of the outlying Plastic clay.
On descending from the higher ground, the chalk—here geologically the lower chalk without flints—is more thinly covered with gravel, and very frequently becomes a part of the cultivated tilth. It does not, as in the Vales of Aylesbury and White Horse, end in bold escarpments immediately overhanging the upper green sand and gault, but sinks to the level of these strata
