Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14.djvu/50

40 "Ten bushels of sainfoin seed.

"Eight bushels of the winter vetches.

"Two bushels of rye-grass seed.

"Fifty pounds of hop-clover seed."

The curious reader may be interested to know that this shipment of goods, somewhat injured by stowage in the hold of the vessel, reached Mount Vernon just one week after Washington had left it to preside over the sittings of the Constitutional Convention. And amidst all the eagerness of those debates under which the ark of our nationality was being hammered into shape, this great man of system did not omit to send to his farm-manager the most minute directions in respect to the disposition of the newly arrived seeds.

Of those directions, and of the farm-method at the home of Washington, I may possibly have something to say at another time: I have named the circumstance only to show that Arthur Young had a world-wide reputation as an agriculturist at this day, (1786-7,) although he lived for more than thirty years beyond it.

Arthur Young was born at a little village near to Bury St. Edmund's, (evermore famous as the scene of Pickwickian adventure,) in the year 1741. He had his schooling like other boys, and was for a time in a counting-room at Lynn, where he plunged into literature at the unfledged age of seventeen, by writing a tract on the American war; and this he followed up with several novels, among which was one entitled "The Fair American." I greatly fear that the book was not even with the title: it has certainly slipped away from the knowledge of all the bibliographers.

At twenty-two, he undertook the management of the farm upon which his mother was living, and of which the lease was about expiring: here, by his own account, he spent a great deal more than he ever reaped. A little later, having come to the dignity of a married man, he leased a farm in Essex, (Samford Hall,) consisting of some three hundred acres. This, however, he abandoned in despair very shortly,—giving a brother-farmer a hundred pounds to take it off his hands. Thereupon he advertises for another venture, gallops through all the South of England to examine those offered to his notice, and ends with renting a hundred-acre farm in Hertfordshire, which proved of "a hungry vitriolic gravel," where, he says, "for nine years, I occupied the jaws of a wolf."

Meantime, however, his pen has not been idle; for, previously to 1773, he had written and published no less than sixteen octavo volumes relating mostly to agricultural subjects, besides two ponderous quartos filled with tabular details of "Experiments on the Cultivation of all Sorts of Grain and Pulse, both in the Old and New Methods."

This last was the most pretentious of his books, the result of most painstaking labor, and by far the most useless and uninteresting; it passed long ago into the waste-paper shops of London. A very full synopsis of it, however, may be found in four or five consecutive numbers of the old "Monthly Review" for 1771.

The great fault of the book is, (and it is the fault of a good many books,) it does not prove what the author wants to prove. He had hoped by a long-continued course of minute experiments (and those detailed in his book count a thousand, and extend over a period of five years) to lay down an exact law of procedure for the guidance of his brother-farmers. But the brother-farmers did not weary themselves over his tables; or if they did, they found themselves as much muddled as the experimenter himself. A good rule for dry weather was a bad one for wet; and what might be advisable for Suffolk would be wrong in Herts. Upon one occasion, where he shows a loss of nearly three pounds to the acre on drilled wheat, against a loss