Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/321

Rh SUMMARY.] AGRICULTURE 299 room, many of them no chimneys, the windows very small holes, and not glazed. The ground in the valleys and plains bears very good corn, but especially bears barley or bigge, and oats, but rarely wheat and rye.&quot; 1 It is probable that no great change had taken place in Scotland from the end of the 15th century, except that tenants gradually became possessed of a little stock of their own, instead of having their farm stocked by the landlord. &quot; The minority of James V., the reign of Mary Stuart, the infancy of her son, and the civil wars of her grandson Charles I., were all periods of lasting waste. The very laws which were made during successive reigns for protecting the tillers of the soil from spoil, are the be.st proofs of the deplorable state of the husbandman.&quot; 2 Yet in the 17th century were those laws made which paved the way for the present improved system of agri culture in Scotland. By statute 1633, landholders were enabled to have their tithes valued, and to buy them either at nine or six years purchase, according to the nature of the property. The statute 1685, conferring on landlords a power to entail their estates, was indeed of a very dif ferent tendency in regard to its effects on agriculture. But the two Acts in 1695, for the division of commons, and separation of intermixed properties, have facilitated in an eminent degree the progress of improvement. PROGRESS OF AGRICULTURE FROM 1688 TO 1760. From the Revolution to the accession of George III. the progress of agriculture was by no means so considerable as we should be led to imagine from the great exportation of corn. It is the opinion of well-informed writers, 3 that very little improvement had taken place, either in the cultivation of the soil or in the management of live stock, from the Restoration down to the middle of last century. Even clover and turnips, the great support of the present improved system of agriculture, were confined to a few districts, and at the latter period were scarcely cultivated at all by common farmers in the northern part of the island. Of the writers of this period, therefore, we shall notice only such as describe some improvement in the modes of culture, or some extension of the practices that were formerly little known. ughto:.. In Houghton s Collections on Husbandry and Trade, a ! periodical work begun in 1681, we have the first notice of turnips being eaten by sheep: &quot;Some in Essex have their fallow after turnips, which feed their sheep in winter, by which means the turnips are scooped, and so made capable to hold dews and rain water, which, by corrupting, imbibes the nitre of the air, and when the shell breaks it runs about and fertilises. By feeding the sheep, the land is dunged as if it had been folded; and those turnips, though few or none be carried off for human use, are a very excellent improvement, nay, some reckon it so though they only plough the turnips in without feeding.&quot; 4 This was written in February 1694 ; but ten years before, &quot;Wor- lidge, one of his correspondents, observes, &quot;Sheep fatten very well on turnips, which prove an excellent nourish ment for them in hard winters when fodder is scarce ; for they will not only eat the greens, but feed on the roots in the ground, and scoop them hollow even to the very skin. Ten acres (he adds) sown with clover, turnips, &c., will feed as many sheep as one hundred acres thereof would before have done.&quot; 5 1 Select Remains of John Ray. Lond. 1760. 2 Chalmers s Caledonia, vol. ii. p. 732. 3 Annals of Agriculture, No. 270. Harte s Essays. Combor on National Subsistence, p. 161. 4 Iloughton s Collections on Husbandry and Trade, vol. i. p. 213, edit. 1723. 5 Hid. vol. iv. pp. 142-144. At this time potatoes were beginning to attract notice. &quot;The potato,&quot; says Honghton, &quot;is a lactiferous herb, with esculent roots, bearing winged leaves and a bell flower. &quot;This, 1 have been informed, was brought first out of Virginia by Sir Walter Raleigh ; and he stopping at Ireland, some was planted there, where it thrived very well, and to good purpose ; tor in their succeeding wars, when all the corn above the ground was destroyed, this supported them ; for the soldiers, unless they had dug up all the ground where they grew, and almost sifted it, could not extirpate them ; from whence they were brought to Lancashire, where they are very numerous, and now they begin to spread all the kingdom over. They are a pleasant food boiled or roasted, and eaten with butter and sugar. There is a sort brought from Spain, that are of a longer form, and are more luscious than ours ; they are much set by, and sold for sixpence or eightpence the pound.&quot; 8 The next writer is Mortimer, whose Whole Art of Hits- Mortime ban-dry was published in 1706, and has since run through 1706. several editions. It is a regular, systematic work, of con siderable merit ; and will even now repay perusal by the practical agriculturist. From the third edition of Hartlib s Legacy, we learn that clover was cut green, and given to cattle ; and it appears that this practice of soiling, as it is now called, had become very common about the beginning of last century, wherever clover was cultivated. Rye-grass was now sown along with it. Turnips were hand-hoed, and extensively employed in feeding sheep and cattle, in the same manner as at present. The first considerable improvement in the practice of that Tull, 17! period was introduced by Jethro Tull, a gentleman of Berk shire, who began to drill wheat and other crops about the year 1701, and whose Horse-hoeing Husbandry, published in 1731, exhibits the first decided step in advance upon the prin ciples and practices of his predecessors. Not contented with a careful attention to details, Tull set himself, with admirable skill and perseverance, to investigate the growth of plants, and thus to arrive at a knowledge of the principles by which the cultivation of field-crops should be regulated. Having arrived at the conclusion that the food of plants consists of minute particles of earth taken up by their rootlets, it fol lowed, that the more thoroughly the soil in which they grew was disintegrated, the more abundant would be the &quot; pasture&quot; (as he called it), to which their fibres would have access. He was thus led to adopt that system of sowing his crops in rows or drills, so wide apart as to admit of tillage of the intervals, both by ploughing and hoeing, being continued until they had well-nigh arrived at maturity. As the distance between his rows appeared much greater than was necessary for the range of the roots of the plants, he begins by showing that these roots extend much far ther than is commonly believed, and then proceeds to inquire into the nature of theirfood. After examining several hypo theses, he decides this to be fine particles of earth. The chief, and almost the only use of dung, he thinks, is to divide the earth, to dissolve &quot; this terrestrial matter, which affords nutriment to the mouths of vegetable roots;&quot; and this can be done more completely by tillage. It is therefore ne cessary not only to pulverise the soil by repeated ploughings before it be seeded, but, as it becomes gradually more and more compressed afterwards, recourse must be had to tillage while the plants are growing ; and this is hoeing, which also destroys the weeds that would deprive the plants of their nourishment. The leading features of TulTs husbandry are his practice of laying the land into narrow ridges of five or six feet, and upon the middle of these drilling one, two, or three rows, distant from one another about seven inches when there were three, and ten when only two. The distance of the 8 Houghton s Collections on Husbandry and Trade, vol. ii. p. 468.