AGRICULTURE. Without attempting any formal treatise on agriculture, useful de tails will be met with under the names of the chief agricultural instruments and the chief vegetable crops. In several countries of Eu 1rope there is a department of government organized either for collecting the statistics of agriculture or superintending institutions which have immediate relation to that branch of industry. In France these duties devolve upon a department of the Minister of Com merce and Agriculture. The councils general of agriculture, &c., in each department of France collect the agricultural statistics from each commune ; and the quantity of land sown with each description of grain, the produce, and the quantity of live stock for the whole of the kingdom, are accurately known and pub fished. In Belgium these facts are ascertained periodically, but not every year. In the United States of North America, at the decennial census, an attempt was made to ascertain the number of each description of live stock, including poultry; the produce of cereal grains, and of various crops ; the quan tity of dairy, orchard, and garden produce, &c., in each State. There are twenty nine beads of this branch of inquiry. The only countries in Europe which do not possess statistical accounts of their agriculture founded on offi cial documents are England and the Nether lands. On the same principle that a census of the population of a country is useful, it must be useful to have an account of its productive resources. The absence of official
information is supplied by estimates of a con jectural character, founded at best only on local and partial observation. In France it is positively ascertained that the average produce of wheat for the whole kingdom is under four teen bushels per acre. In England it is known that the maximum produce of wheat per acre is about forty bushels, and that the minimum is about twenty bushels. The usual conjecture is that the average produce of the kingdom in years of fair crops is about twenty- eight bushels, hut the total superficies sown with wheat or any other grain, and the total quan tity of the produce, are matters simply of con jecture. It would be most desirable to trace what have been the results of the more scien tific cultivation of the last few years. The only statement the public or even the govern ment are in possession of in respect to the quantity of land cultivated and uncultivated, and of land incapable of producing grain or hay, in Great Britain, rests upon the authority of private inquiry made by one person, Mr. Couling, a civil engineer and surveyor, who gave the details to the parliamentary committee on emigration in 1827. From his tables it appears that upwards of forty-six millions of acres were cultivated in the United Kingdom; of which about nineteen millions were culti vated as arable and gardens, and about twenty seven millions were meadows, pastures, and