MEADOWS (ante). The propriety of confining the word meadow either to moist er to level lands covered with grass is doubtful, for though moisture is essential to the growth of grass as to all other crops, and level ground is preferable to rugged, no greater moisture or more level surface is required for good meadow land• than for good corn land. 3larsh hay. is made from marsh meadows, both fresh and salt; while timothy and red clover, grown for hay, flourish best in rich soils not particularly moist, and derive the same advantage from deep-till drainage as other field crops. Grasses of the red-top family grow best in soils a little more moist than required for the best growth of timothy. 3Ieadows are more comprehensively defined to be lands growing gras9es suita ble for hay, whether upland or low land, seeded by hand as on farms, or growing wild en marsh alluviums, or western plains, or mountain valleys. The vast prairies in the basin of the 3Iississippi were probably the greatest extent of natural meadows in the world. Where these grasses were fed down by cattle they ceased to be meadows and became pasture. The use of mowing-machines has quite revolutionized the labor of cut ting hay within the past thirty years, and by their use long reaches of narrow valleys among the drier plains, and still narrower bottoms of defiles in the Rocky mountains, are made to yield hay for the needs of regions where hand laLor could not be obtained to do the work. The second mowing of meadows in one season is called the aftermath. The
seed of clover is usually obtained from its second cutting. In connection with landscape -effects meadows and pasture-lands are grouped together, and it is one of the beautiful effects of cultivated crops in scenery that their different colors and modes of growth ehecker a landscape with varieties of light and shade never seen where there is no culti • vation. A meadow before the cutting, by.the side of one recently cut, makes a contrast as of two different crops, more marked than the contrast between the uncut meadow and the pasture-field. There is no season of the year when lights and shadows in rural scenery are so charming as just after the harvest, or when the hay cutting is nearly done, and the shadows of trees and clouds are brightly outlined on their shaven stubble.