I think with you that the life of a Husbandman of all others is the most delectable. It is honorable. It is amusing, and, with judicious management, it is profitable. To see plants rise from the Earth and flourish by the superior skill, and bounty of the laborer fills a contemplative mind with ideas which are more easy to be conceived than expressed.

I am glad to find that your first essay to raise Indian Corn in drills has succeeded as much to your satisfaction; but I am inclined to think, unless restoratives were more abundant than they are to be found on Common farms, that 6 feet by 2 will be too oppressive to your land. Experience has proved that every soil will sink under the growth of this plant; whether from the luxuriancy and exhausting quality of it, or the manner of tillage or from both, is not very certain, because instead of 2420 plants which stand on an Acre at six feet square, with two stalks in a hill (as is usual in land of middling quality) you have 3630 at 6 feet by 2, single stalks. How far the exposing of land to the rays of the Sun in Summer is injurious, is a question yet more difficult to solve than the other. My own opinion of the matter is, that it does; but this controverts the practice of Summer fallows, which (especially in heavy land) some of the best practical Farmers in England contend for as indispensably necessary notwithstanding the doctrine of Mr. Young, and many others who are opposed to them.

The reason, however, which induced me to give my Corn rows the wide distance of ten feet, was not because I thought it essential to the growth of that plant, but because I introduced other plants between them. And this practice, from the experience of two years, one the wettest, and the other the driest that ever was felt on my Estate, I am resolved to continue untill the inutility of it, or something more advantageous, shall point out the expediency of a change; but I mean to practice it with variations, fixing on 8 by 2 feet as the medium, or standing distance which will give more plants by 300 to the acre, than six feet each way with two stalks in a hill will do.