pounds grudgingly devoted to the labour of a
professor of chemistry, whose zeal fortunately
is not measured by his official income. Out of
six thousand members, five hundred have never
been gathered together at one time, in one
place. The prizes given during two-and-twenty
annual shows on agricultural implements, have
very often been either mistakes when awarded
to novelties, or tardy endorsements of established
agricultural experience—like Lord Chesterfield's
patronage of Johnson's Dictionary—when
allotted to practical utilities. The prizes for live
stock have steadily encouraged the exhibition of
animals too fat to breed, and too costly to eat—
the admiration of the ignorant, and the despair
of the purchasers.

In a word, the Council would have difficulty
in showing that it has achieved any one of the
more ambitious ideas set forth in its founders'
prospectus and embodied in its charter; that it
has ever originated any great improvement in
cultivation, or in live stock, or any original
invention in machinery. And yet, with all these
negative drawbacks, in spite of the falling away
from the grand plans set forth in its charter,
although its scientific, and literary, and
mechanical, and practical claims to the consideration
of the agricultural world will scarcely bear
investigation; although titled dummies and ignorant
busybodies encumber its council; although
it has grown into something quite unlike what
the really great men who founded it proposed,
the Royal Agricultural is one of the most useful
societies in the country—a living, breathing,
and eminently successful institution. Eor it has
supplied a want—taken advantage of a tide—
founded a great annual agricultural festival and
fair, where profit and pleasure are combined,
and the greatest amount of advertising and sale
of live stock and implements—the greatest
amount of eye-teaching that could be conceived—
is packed into the space of about a week and
five-and-twenty acres. For the week of the
great show, the many acres filled with whole
streets of animals and agricultural machines and
tools, include the advantages of a great fair
and pleasures of a gigantic conversazione. At
these shows farmers exchange with friendly
greetings their opinions and their experience
while making bargains, and deliver unrehearsed
unprinted essays on every point of agricultural
interest suggested and illustrated by the
objects of the show.

Thus, just at the time when George Stephenson's
locomotive was about to reduce to a
minimum the time and cost of the conveyance
of the farmer, and all that he buys and sells,
the Royal Agricultural Society provided a
reason and excuse, a compound of business and
pleasure—theory and practice—for drawing him
from the perpetual round of the parish or the
market, where he was either the oracle or the
follower of some local oracle, for showing him
cattle, and sheep, and pigs at least as good as
his own, and of herds and tribes he had never
dreamed of before; for exhibiting to him labour-
saving implements and machinery, which no
village blacksmith would devise, or could make
if he had imagined, and there and then inducing
him to graft his practical experience on the
mechanical skill of agricultural engineers. So the
tiling thrived and thrives, and can bear an
infinite deal of folly in its nominally governing
body.

Three-and-twenty years have passed away
since a party of noblemen breeders, like the
Duke of Richmond, Earls Spencer and Ducie,
and Lord Western; active farming squires,
like Henry Handley, Philip Pusey, and Thomas
Gisborne; and two agricultural authors,
William Youatt and William Shaw, all dead now,
associated with others, still living, who owed
their prominent position to rank and acres,
or to love of bustling notoriety, took up
the happy idea of an English Agricultural
Society, which should be an improvement on
the annual and aristocratic Highland Society,
over which no one of lower rank than a duke
has ever presided, and the voluntary successor
to that board of agriculture founded by Sir
John Sinclair, worked by Arthur Young, and
destroyed by Pitt's income-tax inquiries. An
annual show of live stock, to be encouraged by
prizes, formed the one leading feature of the
original prospectus, which was carried out, and
succeeded. The importance of the mechanical
department, destined to fill two-thirds of five-
and-twenty acres of show-yard in 1861, and of
chemistry, destined to be the one distinguishing
feature of the printed transactions, was so little
known to the eminent men—learned and deep in
all the mysteries of breeding—that in the list
of ten "national objects of the society," the
improvements of agricultural implements and the
application of chemistry to the improvement of
the soil are lumped in one paragraph with "the
destruction of insects, the eradication of weeds,
and the construction of farm buildings." The
"weeds" and the insects, except so far as they
have been disturbed by iron ploughs, harrows,
hoes, drills, rollers, and artificial manures, have
been untroubled by the society; farm buildings
have only been the subject of contradictory
prize essays; while the other objects, such as
"correspondence with foreign societies,"
"experiments at the cost of the society in the
cultivation of the soil," "the management of woods
and ferns," "the improvement of the education
of the farmer and labourer," and attempts to
amend "the management of labourers' cottages
and gardens," have remained for nearly a
quarter of a century on the list of "good
intentions," never to be carried into practice.

In fact, the leading feature of the Royal
Agricultural Society is not in the direct
encouragement of the art or science of agriculture
or philanthropic efforts for the benefit of the
labourer. The influence of the society in these
directions has been infinitesimal, but it has
opened a road, and travellers have thronged it
and paid a good toll as their passage. It has
every year built up a great bazaar, and breeders
and manufacturers, and customers of both, have
crowded there to sell and buy, and learn by the