As we have had numerous inquiries lately, repecting the laying down of grass surfaces for lawns, we shall comfor the benefit of all our readers interested in the matter.

A fine lawn, as everyone knows, is the most essential ground-work of all ornamental plea-sure grounds. It is not so easy to get a fine lawn here as in England, but quite as easy as on most parts of the continent. What we have to contend with, are our dry summers and hot sun - which often parch up and turn brown a lawn made in the ordinary way. This is not to be guarded against, as some suppose, by enriching the top-soil where the lawn is, but by making it deep - so deep that the roots of the grass, instead of depending on the top layer of the soil, which always suffers by the heat of the mid-summer sun, shall run down to the cool under layer, eighteen inches or more deep- which preserves a more uniform moisture and temperature.

If you are preparing the ground for a new lawn, let the first point, then, be to deepen the soil. It ought to be at least 18 inches, and is better if two feet deep. If it is a small surface you can prepare it by trenching - if large, by using the sub-soil plough. It is well to mix a good coat of manure with the sub-soil while this is going on - and it is just as needful (or even more necessary) that the sandy soil should be as deep as clayey - for unless the sub-soil is well stirred the roots of the grass will not penetrate there.

The soil being well prepared, and the surface made quite even and smooth, sow it with a mixture of blue grass and white clover at the rate of three bushels to the acre.* There should be about two quarts of white clover seed to a bushel of blue grass - all mixed intimately together before sowing it; and if a quart or so of sweet scented grass is mixed with the whole before sowing, the lawn will give out a delicious odor every time it is mown. The seed should be sown in a still day (if just before rain so much the better) very evenly, by hand, and the ground should be lightly raked, and if possible rolled afterwards.

* We formerly recommended Red-top and White Clover; but some careful experiments of different grasses for a lawn hare satisfied us that the Poa pratensis - known in various parts of the country as "h......."

To keep a lawn in good order order it requires in our climate, to be mown about once a fortnight - with a sharp, broad-bladed lawn scythe. In England, we found mowing machines in very general use for this purpose, and when there is much lawn to be mown they would be found of equal or even greater value here. One of these machines is small, and is managed by hand; the other requires a man and a horse, and will mow as much in a day as six good mowers. - rolling the lawn as it mows it - and mowing the grass as neatly and evenly as if it was done with a pair of shears.