This is an abundant and cheap plant. It is very good green food for horses, and is procured when there is no other. To sick horses it is an excellent substitute for grass, and many will eat it when they will eat nothing else; but it has been extensively tried as an article of ordinary feeding. It has long been used in many parts of Wales, and of Scotland, and in several of the Irish counties. Mr. Tytler of Balmain was the first, I understand, to publish a useful account of its properties. His essay will be found in the fifth volume of the Highland Society's Transactions. " It appears that, for five successive years, Mr. Tytler fed his farm-horses from the beginning of November to the middle of March, on furze and straw, with a very moderate allowance of oats during only a part of that time. At first oats were given throughout the winter, but afterward only from the beginning of February, and then only at the rate of three pounds two ounces, or about one third of a peck, of average quality, to each; the daily allowance of furze during the first period being tweny-eight pounds, and during the second, eighteen pounds, with fourteen of straw."

Furze is generally used on the frontiers of France and Spain; and the British cavalry while in the Pyrenees, under the duke of Wellington, had no other forage.

According to the Mid-Lothian Report (Appendix No. VI., p. 56), it has been found that an acre of whins is sufficient for six horses, during four months; that they require two years to produce them; that horses, with whins, and one feed of grain, were in as good order as with two feeds and straw;* that all the straw and one feed of oats were thus saved; that, valuing these at sevenpence a-day each horse, the saving in seventeen weeks amounted on the six horses, to £17 17s. - from which, deducting five shillings a-week as the expense of cutting and bruising, there would remain .£13 12s., as the product of two acres.†