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Improved houses for diminishing the labor and increasing the comforts of the family are being made. Such combinations are capable of making the farmer's life more desiraable and happy than any other, because his life is not subject to the uncertainties of many other avocations.
The farmers of Texas have a great advantage over those of some of the older States, in not being obliged to buy fertilizers, in order to make good crops. The State Inspector of fertilizers in Georgia says that the people of that State expended in one year $10,000,000 for fertilizers. However, it would be unwise for our people to trust so far to their rich lands, as to raise continued crops and not return anything to the soil. Many years ago, the black lands of Marengo and other counties adjacent to it, in Alabama, were noted for their large yields of cotton and corn, but continued tillage and no manuring has exhausted them so much that now they will not bear profitable crops without the liberal use of fertilizers.
AGRICULTURAL JOURNALS.
Of these, I believe none are now published in the State. Every farmer should take at least one Southern agricultural paper. The best weekly, of our knowledge, is the Southern Plantation, published at Montgomery, Alabama, Dr. H. A. Swasey, editor. Of monthlies, the Southern Cultivator is well known. The Rural Carolinian, published at Charleston, S. C., is another excellent journal.
CLIMATE.
Texas extends from latitude twenty-six degrees south to latitude thirty-six degrees north and longitude from Washington of a little less than seventeen degrees west to more than twenty-nine degrees west; hence it has a great range and great variety of climate, from nearly tropical to temperate.
At Fort Davis, at an altitude of 5000 feet above the sea, in the month of January, 1873, the thermometer was once fifteen degrees below zero, and in 1875, in the same month, it was five degrees below zero, yet yuccas, agaves, dasylirions, cacti, are common on the prairies, in the valleys and on the mountains of that region at an elevation of 6000 feet and upwards. On the mountains the cold was probably