further ordains that the wives of gaolers and
their female servants shall be remunerated for
performing the flogging, at the rate of fivepence,
English, per woman. The ministers who have
produced this state-paper are earnestly requested
to come to England, and to apply at Messrs.
Barclay and Perkins's Brewery, where they will
hear of something greatly to their advantage.

A NEW VENUS DE' MEDICI, dug up at
Rome. Under present circumstances, the
next treasure of sculpture to be disinterred in
those regions will probably be a statue of
Liberty.

MISSING

A GOVERNMENT MEASURE for the
cheap defence of England, by teaching
Englishmen the use of arms.

FARMING BY STEAM.

THE poets of modern agriculture, the happy
souls who farm a little, write a little, and talk a
great deal at semi-agricultural, semi-scientific,
and wholly social gatherings, are crying out
in joyful tones with more fervour than ever
—for it is not the first time—that the doom of
the plough has been sealed, and that in five
or six years those Clydesdale and Suffolk two-
year old colts that now sell readily for £50 will be
sold for £20, and, as for the old hairy legged breeds,
they will be to be had for asking! The more sober,
like most of those who live to learn and live by
learning, can't go quite so far or so fast. We
remember that after more than twenty years'
experience the broadcast sheet and the flail still
even in England find usage and defenders within
sight of the drill and the threshing machine, and
that in Scotland crack farmers insist on doubling
the work of their men and putting ten per cent of
it on their horses because they won't condescend
to examine the value of the Southron-invented
Bedford plough. But, although believing that
as railroads have not in thirty years closed highways
or filled up canals, it is not likely that
steam power will ever entirely banish horse
power, or even horse-drawn implements from
our fields, we must with pleasure admit that
1859 has seen a scratch made on mother earth
by the steam cultivation that will in future years
be turned to as the mark of a practical advance
in a theory that had very long been under the
harrows of projectors and inventors.

A thick volume might be filled with the
guesses that, in the shape of projects or
patents, have preceded almost every really useful
invention. The reaping machine may be traced
back to the time of the Gauls, wheeled ploughs are
to be found depicted in Saxon manuscripts, and
something like Crosskill's clod crusher is
described as a home-made instrument one hundred
years before the Royal Agricultural Society gave
the Yorkshireman the clod-crushing gold medal.
The French amuse themselves with setting
against the triumph of Watt's steam-engine the
ingenious hints of Salomon de Caux, and have
written a play, in which the Marquis of
Worcester, who was not then born, is made to
converse with and rob of his invention the maniac
philosopher. Even of the electric telegraph
faint traces are to be found in some ancient
philosophical manual.

Steam cultivation is one of those long-sought,
although only recently caught, arrangements.
For two hundred years projectors and inventors
in two hundred patents have been guessing
without success at the agricultural steam truth;
but it does not seem that any attempt was made
to cultivate land by steam power on a scale of
importance, or in a continuous manner, until 1832,
when Mr. Heathcote, of Tiverton, with Mr.
Josiah Parkes for his engineer, commenced
reclaiming Chatmoss by draining and steam
ploughing. The reclaiming did not pay, and the
steam ploughing, although continued for two
or three years with great labour and ingenuity,
did not answer, but the work indirectly led to
the construction of the Parkesian theory of deep
drainage, by which agricultural England has
been revolutionised, and at least doubled in
productive powers. The system adopted by Mr.
Heathcote and Mr. Parkes, of dragging implements
by ropes attached to and revolved by a
stationary steam-engine, is the only system which,
up to the present time, has been found to answer,
although the arrangement of the details and the
materials of the ropes have been modified and
improved.

In the following twenty-five years sixteen
patents were taken out for cultivation by steam
power, none of which were carried into execution,
and in the last ten years nearly one
hundred patents have been provisionally registered,
and more than half that number specified. But
out of this long array, in March, 1859, not
more than six were before the agricultural public
as at work, and not more than three prepared to
make and sell their patented machinery. But,
intermediately, two noblemen, Lord Willoughby
D'Eresby, in Warwickshire, and the Marquis of
Tweedale, in Scotland, had expended large sums
unprofitably in endeavouring to cultivate by
steam traction.

In 1848, the celebrated Talpa, in his
Chronicles of a Clay Farm, one of the most charming
books ever devoted to agricultural disquisitions,
suggested that the problem of steam cultivation
should be sought, not in the traction or propulsion
of the established implements of the farm,
but in a rotatory machine, which should dig as
it travelled round, and propel, or, as it were,
hoe itself forward "with a sort of lobster's
tail." On this ingenious idea a great number of
inventors have been at work ever since, some at
vast expense, but up to the present time not one
successfully in an agricultural point of view.
On one, the best of the attempts to realise Talpa's
poetical notion of perfect steam cultivation, and
which often worked admirably for an hour or
two, more than ten thousand pounds were
expended; but it could never be made to work
without the hourly and costly attention of an