Excerpt from The Elements of Agricultural Geology: A Scientific Aid to Practical FarmingWhile many writers have thus been laid under contri hutien, as is shown by the footnotes, the more important sections of the volume can be claimed as the result of the author's own investigations, carried on for a great number of years. The method he followed was to procure the sheets of the Geological Survey maps for any district to be studied over or even passed through, and to cut them into small squares and paste them on the leaves of notebooks. With these in his pocket, he has worked over hundreds of farms in various parts of the United Kingdom, watched and noted the various kinds of farming passed on railway journeys or on drives, and collected samples of soil for examination where the maps indicated typical surface deposits.All the information so gathered has been sifted and arranged in the light of his own lifelong practical experience. For the last twenty years he has been farming on the London clay in Essex, and this volume has been prepared in the intervals of leisure in the management of a large holding of mixed husbandry - in the winter evenings, on wet or stormy days, in the summer mornings between sunrise and the beginning of the day's work, and so on the preparation of the manuscript taking ten years in its accomplishment.It is now presented to the public who are interested in scientific farming, as an honest endeavour to help on the development of the most ancient and the most important of all human occupations - agriculture.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.