Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume I.djvu/230

 206 AGRICULTURE the highest interests of the people hy the im- provement of agriculture. Many years elapsed before the habit of reading became sufficiently common among the masses of the actual tillers of the soil to justify an expectation of imme- diate profit from the annual publication of the transactions of the several societies. The im- provements proposed fell dead upon the people, who rejected u book farming " as impertinent and useless, and knew as little of the chemis- try of agriculture as of the problems of as- tronomy. All farm practices were merely tra- ditional; no county or town agricultural so- cieties existed to stimulate effort by competi- tion. There were no journals devoted to the spread of agricultural knowledge. The stock of the farm was such as one might expect to find under such circumstances ; the sheep were small and ill cared for in the winter, and the size of cattle generally was but little more than half the average of the present time. The value of manures was little regarded ; the rotation of crops was scarcely thought of; the introduction even of new and labor-saving ma- chinery was sternly resisted and ridiculed by the American farmers of that day, as well as by the English laborers. It was long before the horse rake was brought into use in oppo- sition to the prejudices it encountered. It was equally long before the horse-power threshing machine was adopted. In some parishes of Great Britain, even so late as 1830, the labor- ers went about destroying every machine they could find. Within the last half century, chemistry, the indispensable handmaid of agriculture, has grown with great rapidity, and in each new discovery some new truth appli- cable to practical agriculture has come to light. In the time of the Saxons, in England, as we have already seen, the plough was extremely rude. It was made by the ploughman him- self, under the compulsion of a law forbidding any one to hold a plough who could not make one, or to drive until he could make the har- ness. The progress made previous to the time of Jethro Tull was comparatively slight, either in the manufacture of the plough, or in any other branch of agricultural mechanics. Tull, as we have seen, invented the horse hoe and the drilling machine. Both of these were then rude, but they have since been vastly improved in their details. The plough was generally made of wood till the beginning of the present, century, but its form has since passed through many changes. It cannot yet be regarded as a perfect implement of its kind, but it has been fast approaching toward perfection of late years, and the mode of manufacture has im- proved to an equal extent. (See PLOUGH.) Nor has the improvement in other farm imple- ments been less marked than in the plough. Spades and hoes are lighter and better con- structed than formerly. The reaper and the mower have gained a firm footing even with- in the last 30 years. As labor and time-saving machines are now deemed indispensable by all who raise grain and hay on a large scale, the reaper and the mower may be regarded as types of the present, as the sickle and the flail are types of the past. (See MOWING AND REAP- ING MACHINES.) Among the other labor-saving implements which are now generally intro- duced upon farms of any extent are the horse rake, the improved horse hoes, the seed and corn sowers, the broadcast seed sower, the improved subsoil and trenching ploughs, the straw and root cutters, the cultivators, the threshing and winnowing machines, and many others of equal importance. It is safe to say that the improvements in the implements named, made within the last half century, have enabled the farmers of the United States to accomplish at least double the amount of labor with the same number of teams and men. This is a grand and practical advance over all for- mer periods in its history, and promises a fu- ture development of the resources of agricul- ture almost beyond the power of language to describe. The progress which has been made in the application of chemistry to agriculture is hardly less gratifying. For though from year to year there may seem to be little progress, yet when we compare any two periods of five or ten years, the increase of practical knowledge derived from the investigations of the agricul- tural chemist, as well as its importance, is very perceptible. Since 1840, chiefly through the labors of Prof. Liebig, animal and mineral phosphates, superphosphate of lime, and other artificial manures have come to be very exten- sively employed ; and it is only since the same date that guano, though known long before, has come into general use. (See AGRICULTURAL CHEMISTRY, BONE DUST, GUANO, &c.) An im- partial survey will show that the actual pro- duction of the means of supporting life has largely increased, as the true principles of cul- tivation have become better known and under- stood. The average yield per acre of some of the cultivated grains, as wheat, for instance, has nearly quadrupled in countries where these prin- ciples have gained the strongest hold, even with- in the memory of men still living ; and this in- crease is not merely proportionate to the great- er number of producers, or the additional acres brought under tillage, but an absolute increase per acre. It is difficult to ascertain the amount of crops, or the average yield, of very distant times past, but the average yield per acre of wheat in the llth century was estimated by the highest authority of that day, the author of "Fleta," at only 6 bushels. So 300 years later, in 1390, 57 acres on a farm at Haw- sted yielded only 366 bushels, and on an aver- age of three years little more than that. The actual productive power of Great Britain in the article of wheat alone increased during the half century from 1801 to 1851 to the extent ' of supporting an additional population of 7,000,000, an increase which can be ascribed with confidence mainly to improved cultiva- tion. So in every country where agriculture