From what has already been seen, the reader will not be astonished on his arrival with us at the Dairy Farm, to find every arrangement in accordance with the fine condition of the cows, and the enviable (to all other cows) circumstances in which they live. The cow-sheds are divided into fifty stalls, each; and the appearance presented reminded one of the neatness and order of cavalry stables. Each stall is marked with a number; a corresponding number is marked on one horn of the cow to whom it belongs; and, in winter time, or any inclement season (for they all sleep out in fine weather) each cow deliberately finds out, and walks into her own stall. No. 173 once got into the stall of No. 15; but, in a few minutes, No. 15 arrived, and "showed her the difference." In winter, when the cows are kept very much in-doors, they are all regularly groomed with currycombs. By the side of one of these sheds there is a cottage where the keepers live—milkers and attendants—each with little iron bedsteads, all in orderly soldier fashion, the foreman's wife acting as the housekeeper.
These men lead a comfortable life, but they work hard. The first "milking" begins at eleven o'clock at night; and the second, at half past one in the morning. It takes a long time, for each cow insists upon being milked in her own pail—i.e., a pail to herself, containing no milk of any other cow—or, if she sees it, she is very likely to kick it over. She will not allow of any mixture. In this there would seem a strange instinct, accordant with her extreme susceptibility to contamination.
The milk is all passed through several strainers, and then placed in great tin cans, barred across the top, and sealed. They are deposited in a van, which starts from the Farm about three in the morning, and arrives at the dairy, in Farringdon-street, between three and four. The seals are then carefully examined, and taken off by a clerk. In come the carriers, commonly called "milkmen," all wearing the badge of Friern Farm Dairy; their tin pails are filled, fastened at top, and sealed as before, and away they go on their early rounds, to be in time for the early-breakfast people. The late-breakfasts are provided by a second set of men.
Such are the facts we have ascertained with regard to one of the largest of the great dairy farms near London.
SAILING IN THE AIR.—HISTORY OF AERONAUTICS.
Aeronautics, or the art of sailing in the air, is of very modern date; if, indeed, we are warranted to say that the art has yet been acquired, for we have only got a machine or apparatus capable of sustaining some hundreds of pounds in the air, the means of guiding and propelling it having yet to be discovered. The attention and admiration of men would doubtless be attracted from the beginning to the ease, grace, and velocity with which the feathered race soar aloft, and wing their way in the upper regions; but there is no reason to believe that any of the nations of antiquity—not even Greece and Rome, with all their progress in science and art—ever made the smallest advances toward a discovery of a method of flying, or of aerial navigation.
Archytas of Tarentum, a celebrated Pythagorean philosopher, who flourished about four hundred years before the Christian era, is indeed said to have constructed a wooden flying pigeon; but, from the imperfect accounts transmitted to us of its machinery, there is every probability that its flight was one of the many deceptions of the magic art which the ancients so well understood and so expertly practiced. The attention of man was much earlier, as well as more earnestly and successfully turned to the art of navigating lakes, rivers, and seas. To gratify his curiosity, or to better his condition, he was prompted to emigrate, or to pass from one place to another, and thus he would tax his ingenuity to discover the means by which he might be enabled to accomplish his journey. To make the atmosphere the medium of transit, would, in the early stages of society, hardly strike the mind at all, or, if it did, it would only strike it as a physical impossibility. Nature has not supplied man with wings, as it has done the fowls of heaven, and to find a locomotive means of transportation through the air was in the infancy of all science absolutely hopeless. But advantage would be early taken of the buoyant property of water, particularly of the sea, which must have been known to mankind from the creation. The canoe and the raft would be first constructed, and, in the course of time, experience would teach men to build vessels of a larger size, to fix the rudder to the stern, to erect the mast, and unfurl the sails. Thus would the art of navigating the ocean advance from step to step, while the art navigating the air remained a mystery, practiced, it may be, by flying demons, and flying witches, and the like ethereal beings of a dark mythology, but an achievement to which ordinary mortals could make no pretensions.
Our object in this paper is to give a concise history of aeronautics, commencing at that period when something like an approach was made to the principles upon which the art could be reduced to practice.