that he was ready to take any number of orders
at a price that farmers could afford to pay.

At Salisbury, in 1857, when the Royal
Agricultural Society repeated their offer of a prize
of £500 for a steam-plough, Mr. Smith of
Wolston, was excluded from the competition by
a mistake in the conditions (whether intentional
or not we are not able to say), which made it
essential that the implement should turn the soil
over, while, as already observed, it is an essential
feature of the Wolston system that the soil
should be thoroughly "stirred and smashed up"
—not turned over.

The ground for the Salisbury trial was not
favourable to steam cultivation. Fowler's plough
alone, of three competitors, did creditable work:
so creditable that the judges and stewards
concurred in recommending that a part of the prize-
money should be awarded to it. But this
recommendation was rejected by a majority of the
council. And certainly, up to that date, Mr.
Fowler had not produced a commercially useful
machine—that is to say, a machine that could be
trusted to work on without breaking down, that
could be easily moved and set to work, and that
could be sold at a price within the means of
first-class rent-paying tenant farmers.

In February, 1858, a paper was read before the
Society of Arts by a gentleman of well-deserved
reputation as a contributor of Prize Essays to
the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society,
which will become a curious bit of history in a
few years; for, the author, wild and wide of the
reality of the subject, notices in succession, not
only the successful Wolston and since successful
Fowler, systems, but half a dozen others, and
praises and encourages almost all: even such
mechanical absurdities as the Elephantine Traction
Machine, which wears itself out hourly as it
travels: and a scheme for bottling up compressed
air and letting out from mains and elastic tubes
to be laid down under and over a farm! and he
concludes by recommending an entirely new implement,
with a new "cutting and inverting movement,"
something like a barrel armed with sharp
discs driven endways. In fact, the idea of an
uninvented machine—a sort of mechanical nightmare
to be propelled by an impossible motion!

At the Chester Exhibition of the Royal
Agricultural Society in July of the same year Messrs.
Howard exhibited Mr. Smith's machinery
manufactured by them, and Mr. Fowler his latest
modification of his steam-plough. After a serious
trial the prize of £500 was awarded to the latter,
and the large gold medal to the former. It was
considered by the engineers that Fowler had a
better mechanical arrangement, and by the
agricultural judges that he did at one operation what
Smith did at two.

Smith's system, as exhibited by Messrs.
Howard at Chester, consisted of two operations.
The first with a strong speed-tined cultivator of a
sort of anchor shape, which penetrates the ground
6 or 7 inches, tears it up, stirring much deeper
than it tears. Secondly, with a larger instrument
of the same kind, which, travelling in a
transverse direction at the same depth, clears
away any portions surrounded by the first, and
reverses the whole topsoil, exposing a rough
unequal surface to the action of the atmosphere;
the two operations being completed at the rate
of 3½ acres per day.

The comparative position of these rival
cultivators at the close of 1858 was this: Mr.
Fowler, with a costly and ponderous arrangement
of machinery, doing very good and rapid
work, had won prizes from the Highland, the
West of England, the Irish, the Yorkshire, and
the English Agricultural Societies in the order
named.

Mr. Smith, with an ordinary portable steam-
engine, a wire rope, and machinery that cost
some £200, had cultivated his own farm, and
reduced it to a tilth and degree of fertility that
excited universal admiration, and had sold some
twenty or thirty sets of his tackle to purchasers
who also worked it successfully: especially in
Worcestershire, Staffordshire, Beds, and Bucks.

Thus, while by a series of changes and
improvements Mr. Fowler contrived to obtain a
greater amount of power and work out of a
steam-engine and rope drawing a set of ploughs,
better arranged than any of the previous
experimenters in the same direction, the Wolston
Farmer had better appreciated the capabilities of
steam cultivation, and, with the assistance of the
most eminent ploughmaker of the day, had
produced a set of steam cultivating implements
admirably calculated to carry out a system
which, for distinction, we should like to name
Wolstonising.

"On the Wolston Farm one hundred and ten
acres of stiff clay arable land, by drainage and
Mr. Smith's peculiar yet simple mode of
cultivation, has become as fine and deep in tilth
as a market garden, and requires just as little
trouble to keep it in a clean and healthy condition."
A writer in Bell's Messenger describes
a field of ten acres at Wolston from which a
tenth crop was about to be taken, in 1858-9,
without fallow. "For five years this field had
never been turned over on the old principle of
ploughing."

Agricultural public opinion having been thus
ripened, a great step in advance was made
the other day by Mr. Fowler, which reduced
the weight, of his apparatus, exclusive of the
steam-engine, from three tons and a half to
about twelve hundredweight, and the price
from about £450 to less than £250 for a set of
tackle and implements capable of performing
every process of cultivation on arable soil, still
retaining everything that was valuable in his
successive improvements. If this be so—and we
believe it is—then we may expect to see steam
cultivation, within a very few years, introduced on
every farm of deep retentive soil which now
possesses a portable steam-engine, and on
hundreds of farms to which it will make its way,
bringing with it the steam-engine and divers
other contingent improvements.

The following is an attempt to describe the
working of the two systems—a very difficult
task without the illustration of diagrams.