army of mechanics, and, in spite of their aid,
it continually broke down. If it were strong, it
was too heavy; if it were light, it was too weak;
and there the rotatory locomotive theory of
steam cultivation rests at present.

By a curious coincidence with the story of the
origin of modern agricultural draining, told in
the Quarterly Review of April, 1858, the most
profitable system of steam cultivation was
suggested by an attempt to substitute machinery
for manual labour in laying draining tiles. The
inventor, Mr. John Fowler, produced before the
Royal Agricultural Society, at Gloucester, in 1858,
a contrivance for forcing a mole plough, drawn by
a team of horses, through the ground at four feet
depth, followed by a rope on which a line of drain
tiles were strung. Step by step, he substituted
a wire rope (a modern invention) for hemp, and
a portable steam-engine for horses, but when in
1855, at Carlisle, he had succeeded in laying
pipe tiles with great accuracy in soils tolerably
level and free from stones, he began, we imagine,
to suspect that the great elements of success in
machinery—that is, to supersede manual labour,
speed, and economy—were wanting. Hence he
was induced to moderate his ambition, and be
content to plough a few inches instead of burrowing
three or four feet; and there, after four years of
enormously costly experiments, he has achieved
the measure of success we shall presently relate.
But he had a successful precursor in a self-taught
mechanic—as far as he is a mechanic—and a real
farmer, in the person of a gentleman bearing the
not remarkable name of Smith, and, therefore,
now distinguished by the title of his farm, as
Smith of Wolston: a name which, in three
years, has become deservedly famous throughout
the English-speaking agricultural world.

The general effort of the agricultural improvements
of the last twenty years has been to
increase the pace at which agricultural operations
are executed. The first change was to substitute
fallow crops, such as roots, for instance, for
the absolute barrenness by which land was
formerly rested after an exhausting crop—a plan
which is still all but universal among the peasant
proprietors and métayers of France and South
Germany. The second change consisted in
making strenuous efforts to execute in autumn
a greater part of the cultivation, which until
recently it was the custom with the great
majority of farmers to execute in spring. It
was observed that weeds brought to the surface
in the autumn naturally died more easily than in
the spring, while the subsoil brought to the
surface, and tough clay under any circumstances,
was mellowed and ripened by winter frosts and
winds.

Mr. Smith of Wolston, was one of the many
converts to the system of autumnal cultivation,
and in studying the best means of carrying it
out he came to the conclusion that the plough
which buried the weeds, and left a large
percentage to grow again in the spring, was a
mistake, and that an instrument which would more
nearly approach the action of the spade was the
right implement. With this view he invented his
subsoil plough, which stirs without turning over
the soil, and his cultivator with curved tines,
which breaks up the topsoil without reversing
it.

But every farmer who has turned his attention
to breaking up strong soils for autumnal cultivation
has found himself beaten by the want of
power to move the most useful kind of implements,
and by want of pace to execute his work
during and immediately after harvest before the
autumn rains set in. A farmer holding twelve
hundred acres of land in two farms of which four
hundred acres are arable land, in a stiff clay
district, writes us on this subject: "To get these
worked up, I should require the power of seventy
horses from the middle of August to the middle
of September, but fifteen would do all my work
for the rest of the year!"

The Farmer of Wolston tells us, in his letter
to B. Disraeli, M.P., "that a report of the
Royal Agricultural Society on implements called
his attention to the resources of steam power."
At the Carlisle Show of 1855 he was awakened to
the power of steam—ordered a steam engine from
Messrs. Ransome and an iron rope and tackle from
Mr. Fowler, whose reputation had been established
by his tile-laying machinery. Soon afterwards,
arose fierce disputes as to priority of invention or
adaptation between these two gentlemen; but to
the public there is no interest in disputes, the
merits of which, as far as the mechanical part of
the question goes, few if any can understand or
care to understand. As in the old gold and
silver shield story, the Farmer and the Fowler
are both right, and have separate and not
opposing merits.

One certain fact is, that the Man of Wolston
first saw and acted on his sound conclusion, that
it would be much more easy, simple, and
economical, to apply steam power to "cultivators
and grubbers," which, to use his own
expressive phrase, "smashed up the soil" and
brought the weeds to the surface, than the old
system of ploughs, which turn over the soil and
bury the weeds; and in 1855-6 he successfully
applied this system to the cultivation of about
one hundred acres of his own farm.

At the Chelmsford Show, in 1856, Mr.
Fowler produced his steam plough, which
was strictly a plough, being a frame on which
six or eight shares were arranged, of which
half were at work while the others were
alternately carried in front in the air. This he
worked with such a measure of success on Mr.
Fisher Hobb's farm, that Mr. Hudson, the
celebrated agriculturist of Castlacre, Norfolk, and a
cautious man, there and then declared himself a
convert to steam cultivation, and offered to
contract for having a good many acres ploughed if
a machine were sent.

But, although ever since that day Mr. Fowler's
steam plough has been constantly before the
public, it was not until the beginning of this year,
and until he had become the possessor of some
score of patents, and until more than twenty
thousand pounds had been expended, that he
was able to make a decided stand, and announce