HAY-MAKING MACHINE. The grasses which form the material of a field of hay are of several kinds. The sweet-scented vernal grass gives the delightful odour to newly mown hay ; the cock's foot grass, a coarser but valu able herbage ; the fox tail grass, greatly re lished by cattle ; the meadow fox tail grass, liked by sheep ; the meadow fescue, and many other kinds. All these are alike cut down by the mower's scythe; which is a long thin blade of steel, well tempered, and having a rim of iron along the back to within a few inches of the point ; the handle is of wood, and is ad justed at a particular angle to the plane of the blade ; two short projecting handles are fixed to the principal to facilitate the using.
There is no machine, we believe, to super sede hand labour in cutting hay ; and there fore the so-called hay-making machines must be understood as applying to a later process. Under ordinary circumstances, the cOt grass is collected into heaps by rakes, worked by hand ; but on large farms a horse rake is sometimes used; there are twenty or more teeth or tines, which are drawn over the field until they have collected as much as the inr.
terstices can contain ; and then the driver, by lifting up a pair of handles, raises the teeth from the ground, so as to throw out the con tents of the rake. The hay making or hay ted ding machine, however, turns the hay over and over in the field ; it is chiefly valuable for meadow-hay, which requires more turning and scattering than hay from clover or rye-grass: Thera is a cylinder, or framework of wheels, with rows of prongs projecting from the sur face ; the cylinder revolves on the same axis as the driving-wheels, and with the same speed as those wheeld. As the cylinder revolves, the hay is caught up by the prongs, and tho roughly tedded or spread abroad. Various minor improvements have from time to time been made in the construction of these ma chines.