drill husbandry from Lombardy, and brought out his famous horse-hoe; and Lord Townshend had popularised in Norfolk the four-course rotation, drilling, and horse-hoeing, setting an example which was slowly followed in other counties. There were many different drills in use, including the Northumberland drill, which sowed soot, lime, or ashes with turnip seed; and the Suffolk corn drill, then the best implement for cereals, as, with improvements, it remained during the greater portion of the succeeding century. Arthur Young gives a drawing of a drill used in Essex, which had coulters of the pattern reintroduced to this country as a novelty from the United States a few years ago, and now generally preferred to the cutting coulters which had superseded them for generations. Drilling, of course, was much less common than it is at present; and its advantage was a subject of warm controversy, particularly in relation to the sowing of corn. But even now there are parts of England in which the broadcasting of corn is generally practised in preference to drilling. The dibbling of corn was a method of sowing much in favour at the end of the eighteenth century, and for at least fifty years later. A report on Suffolk, written in 1797, says that the practice was only recently introduced. There are many farmers now living who had a good deal of corn and pulse dibbled in their early days of farming; and when corn was dear and labour cheap there was no more economical method of sowing. But when corn became cheap and the labour of women and children difficult to obtain, the practice became nearly extinct.

Many of the ploughs in use a hundred years ago were clumsy and of heavy draught; but most of them have held their own locally, with but slight modifications. In this connexion it is curious to notice an early anticipation of a modern invention. Before 1770, Mr Ducket, of Petersham, Surrey, had brought out a three-furrow plough, with which he turned up from three to four acres in a day, using four or five horses; while two-furrow ploughs were found by Young in several counties. Many living farmers can remember such ploughs being brought out afresh as complete novelties, though, like the inventions of Mr Ducket and others, they rapidly fell into disuse. An equally striking example of the kind of anticipation under notice is afforded by Young's illustrated description of another of Mr Ducket's

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ploughs, which appears to have been the prototype of the 240 Oliver,' the latest American plough to become popular in Great Britain. Like its modern counterpart, Ducket's plough had two breasts, one, a little in advance of the other, to pare and turn over the turf, which the hind breast completely buried by throwing a second furrow-slice on top of the first. As for the Kentish turn-wrest plough, which was an ancient implement when Mr John Boys, in his 'Survey of Kent,' noticed and praised it as the best for all soils,' it is still commonly used in its native county and in parts of Sussex, doing work which cannot be beaten in excellence by any plough in the world, but doing it expensively, as it requires four, or at least three, horses. Harrows, rolls, and other implements have been greatly improved; but some primitive forms of them have survived till now. Mowing and reaping machines of a practical kind are comparative novelties, but a reaping machine was brought out in 1780 by Mr Lofft, of Bury St Edmunds, which, though subsequently improved, had but slight success. The horse-rake, however, had been introduced before the year 1800, and chaff was cut by hand or horse-power.

Among the farm crops commonly grown not one is new to the nineteenth century. All kinds of corn, potatoes, common turnips, swedes, kohl-rabi, cattle-cabbages, carrots, mangolds, clover, lucerne, sainfoin, rye-grass, tares, hops, flax, and hemp were cultivated in the preceding century, though a few of them were grown by only a minority of enterprising farmers.

It was in the choice of fertilisers that the old-time farmer was most at a disadvantage-a fact which illustrates the statement that it is mainly to the connexion of science with agriculture that the improvement in modern farming is due. The only manures commonly used down to the end of the eighteenth century were farmyard and town manure, night-soil, marl, lime, chalk, soot, whaleblubber, fish manure, and malt dust; while a few enterprising men used bones and rape dust also, and the ploughingin of green crops had been tried occasionally. There were no artificial manures, and the importation of such natural fertilisers as guano and nitrate of soda did not begin until the nineteenth century was far advanced. Moreover, the farmyard manure, as a rule, was but little better than rotten straw, as oilcake was not in general use, and

corn-feeding for any other animals than horses and pigs was uncommon. The use of malt dust as a fertiliser, put on in small quantities with a turnip and manure drill, indicated a lack of chemical knowledge. One operation, temporarily fertilising, but exhausting in the long run, was commonly practised at the time under notice, but has happily become almost extinct. This was the paring and burning of pasture land, which was denounced by the most enlightened agriculturists of the period.

In consequence mainly of the deficiency and inferiority of the manures used, the corn crops of the eighteenth century were certainly not usually equal to those grown in more recent times. The highest average yield of wheat given in any of the 'County Surveys' was Vancouver's estimate for Essex in 1794, namely, 24 bushels per acre, which Young endorsed a few years later. Essex at that time was, in Young's opinion, better farmed, on the whole, than any other county in England; and occasional yields up to 58 bushels per acre are mentioned as having been obtained. The average given above, however, compares ill with 29.7 bushels per acre as the ten years' average for Essex according to the agricultural returns for 1899. For Suffolk, also one of the best cultivated counties, Young, in 1797, estimated the average yields of corn at 22 bushels for wheat, 28 bushels for barley, and 32 to 34 bushels for oats; whereas the ten years' averages given for the same county by the present Board of Agriculture are a minute fraction under 29 bushels for wheat, 32 for barley, and 40% for oats. If, however, contemporary estimates are to be believed, there is one crop which has deteriorated in natural productiveness. There is no doubt that the potato has been weakened in constitution by prolonged reproduction from tubers; and it is to be borne in mind that the common disease of the present day was not known in this country till long after the beginning of the nineteenth century. Therefore it is quite credible that the crops grown with very little manure a hundred years ago were much heavier than they are under like circumstances now. Young mentions crops up to 700 bushels per acre, which, at 70 lb. per bushel-the weight which he gives for the old heaped measure—were equivalent to nearly 22 tons. This would be a wonderful crop in even the best potato districts of

Scotland, where the application of fertilisers is far beyond any dressings thought of in Young's time. Again, in his report of his tour through Berkshire, Young notices many crops of 600 bushels per acre, or over 183 tons; and Rudge, in his 'Survey of Gloucester,' says that 450 bushels per acre, or over 13 tons, were not uncommon on good land. It is certain that even this last yield would seldom be obtained at the present time with such deficient manuring as was almost universal at the earlier period.

Land draining was practised by enterprising landowners and farmers for some time before the end of the eighteenth century, the system having been improved by Elkington; but it was chiefly bush or stone draining, and such drains become choked in the course of a few years. Cylindrical tiles for draining were not invented till many years later. Water-meadows were referred to as novelties in 1798 by Robert Lowe, in his report to the Board of Agriculture on Nottinghamshire.

The enclosure of commons, wastes, and open fields had made great progress in the latter part of the eighteenth century; but still there were immense tracts unenclosed. Mr R. E. Prothero, in his 'Pioneers and Progress of English Farming,' after referring to Young's observations upon this subject in 1773, notices that the Committee of the Board of Agriculture upon Enclosures estimated that 22,000,000 acres of land in Great Britain lay at waste, 14,218,224 acres of this area being in Scotland, and 1,629,307 acres in Wales. A very large proportion of this total was not worth cultivation, as may be inferred from the fact that the total cultivated area (crops, fallow, and grass) of Great Britain at the present time is only 34,437,386 acres. Still, the commons and cultivable waste land occupied a large space, while the open fields covered a great deal more. So late as 1794 it was calculated that, out of 8500 parishes in England, 4500 were farmed in common. In some counties the proportions of the land tilled under the open-field system were very large, including 24,000 out of 84,000 acres of arable land in Bedfordshire, 220,000 out of 438,000 acres of total area in Berkshire, and 132,000 out of 147,000 acres of arable land in Cambridgeshire. Under the same system there were 90,000 acres in Bucks, 268,000 in Leicestershire, and 130,000 in Hunts. In Scotland the corresponding run-rig system was general until about the

middle of the eighteenth century, and still prevailed extensively at the end of that period. The reports to the Board of Agriculture on the counties of Scotland in 1794 and 1795 show that the in-field and out-field regulations pertaining to the open-field system were still common in some counties, and that great tracts of country were unfenced. Until the latter part of the eighteenth century agriculture in Scotland was far behind that of all but the most backward districts of England. Berwickshire, the cradle of Scottish husbandry,' led the march of improvement before 1750; but even in that county the general run of farmers were at first slow to follow the example of Lord Kames and other advanced agriculturists, though they made fairly rapid progress in the last quarter of the century.

The live stock of Great Britain, and particularly the cattle and sheep, had been greatly improved before the year 1800. Bakewell had improved the Longhorn, though not to much purpose, as it was doomed to be set aside generally in favour of the Shorthorn, known at the time as the Holderness, which the brothers Colling, then in the midst of their career, had taken in hand with good effect. The Tomkins family and others had done good work among the Herefords, and Francis Quartley with the Devons; while the Sussex cattle for beef, and the Norfolk and Suffolk polled cattle for the dairy, were accounted by Young as among the best varieties in the country. The Galloway and the Angus, however, though famous in Scotland, had not yet been strikingly improved by any particular breeder: Hugh Watson, the earliest of the great improvers of the latter breed-now developed into the Aberdeen-Angus-only began to farm land in 1808. Bakewell had earned immortal fame by his great transformation of the Leicester breed of sheep, while John Ellman, of Glynde, had done much for the Southdowns, and David Dun, in consequence of his efforts to improve the blackfaced sheep, had been described as 'the Bakewell of Scotland.' Suffolk horses were famous as the best for the plough in Young's day, but no particular breeder's name stands forth pre-eminently as an improver of the animals. The Shire, as a distinct breed, was not in existence, though its progenitors, the heavy hairy-legged cart-horses of the Midlands and Lincolnshire, were famous, and the first of