WITH MANY VALUABLE TABLES FOR MACHINISTS, MANUFACTURERS, MER- AUTHOR OF BY GEORGE E. WARING, Jr., "ELEMENTS OF AGRICULTURE," "DRAINING For profit and for health," E. B. TREAT & CO., 654 BROADWAY; C. W. LILLEY, CHICAGO, ILL.; A. H. HUBBARD, PHILA., PA.; Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by E. B. TREAT & Co., In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. Sanford, Cushing & Co., Printers, 644 & 646 Broadway, New York... UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PREFACE. THERE are few persons, no matter what their calling or their education, who do not occasionally find themselves at a loss for information of the commonest kind, on any of the subjects pertaining to the practical arts of daily life--knowledge which was, perhaps, familiar to them in their schoolboy days, but which has been forgotten or become obscured through the lapse of years. For example, how few persons can tell, without consulting books, the cubic inches contained in a bushel, the square yards in an acre, or how to measure the contents of a corn crib, or gauge a cistern. Nor is the inability to do so any reflection upon either their native capacity or their education. It is simply impossible to carry all these things in the memory so as to apply them when occasion requires. Hence the necessity for "Hand-Books," "Mechanics' Assistants," "Pocket Companions," &c. Besides the labor involved in the almost daily necessity of calculating arithmetical, mensural, and other results, and the constant liability to error to which even the competent scholar is subject, the time required in the process, in this age, when time has emphatically acquired a money value, is no inconsiderable desideratum. Hence the necessity for "Ready Reckoners," "Pocket Accountants," "Calculators' Assistants," &c. 195064 In presenting this volume, a chief aim of the author was so to combine the Manual with the Reckoner, as to furnish the inquirer, in brief, with all the necessary rules and data and the elementary facts and axioms relating to almost every branch of industrial science, and particularly that of agriculture, and, at the same time, whenever it was possible, to compute and tabulate the results for him in the same connection. Hence he will find in the ensuing pages the axiomatical or elementary propositions, the data, the standards, the units, &c., of almost every useful and practical art with which the farmer may have to deal, clearly stated, together with their simplest rules, illustrated by examples and solutions, and, wherever it was practicable, the arithmetical results calculated and tabularized. Those who consult this book must remember that it is not a work of recipes, prescriptions, or of directions and advice as to the best mode of conducting any or all the various operations pertaining to agriculture, &c. But they will bear in mind that the subjects of which this book treats are, for the most part, facts and figures-assured analyses and demonstrations-about which there can be no dispute. The design was to produce a work of substantial and enduring value, and of universal application and use-something in the sphere of agriculture corresponding to Haswell in Engineering, or Fairbairn in Mechanics. How far the author's labors have tended to that end remains to be tested by experience. He is sanguine of their ultimate fruition. So vast is the domain of agriculture, that there are few of the mechanic arts of which the farmer does not require some information, and which he is often compelled to seek through many books and journals. He is, in a certain sense, encyclopediac in his science and use. Hence many subjects |