world, and cannot move a step without his new
friend, the agricultural engineer.

It is very difficult to give an idea, even
to a visitor full of what he has seen at the
Baker-street Show, of the effect of the streets
between sheds filled with goods chiefly for
the use of farmers and partly for the sight-
seeing public who crowd these agricultural
thoroughfares. There are the tools and
machines for breaking up and stirring the ground,
from the simple spade or steel fork to the
plough and many-tined cultivator, from the
horse-plough at five pounds to the steam-
cultivator at from two hundred to seven hundred
pounds; there are the machines for sowing
seed, from the hand-dibble to the drill, in all its
varieties, dry and with water, with chemical
manure and without, in lines and broadcast, for
the flat and the ridge, for plains and for steep
hills; there are horse-hoes as well as hand-
hoes, and every contrivance for extirpating
weeds and ridging up earth round roots; there
are sickles and scythes of new and old patterns,
and a dozen different kinds of corn-reaping and
grass-mowing machines; there are an endless
variety of contrivances moved by hand, by horse-
power, by steam, for thrashing out, collecting
cleaning, and sorting every kind of seed
crop.

Then follow the endless contrivances for feeding
cattle and manufacturing meat: our modern
demands for meat cannot be satisfied by mere
grass and hay, or roots, or corn, or lentils in their
natural state—they are sliced, pulped, and
steamed in half a dozen different ways. Great
is the noise of chaff-cutters, for horse, hand,
and steam-power; working continually with a
whizzing noise which would be unbearable
in a more confined space. Other machines
split beans, crush oats, grind corn, and in
every possible manner profess to save the
time, the teeth, and digestion of meat-making
animals. At the same time, steam-engines,
portable or fixed, painted in the gayest colours,
send their driving wheels round, setting in
motion elaborate machinery which works here
only at straw but which is ready to take in sheaves
of corn at one end and deliver it as grain in sacks,
cleaned, weighed, and ready for market at the
other. Carts and waggons, sufficient to supply
a small army, are ranged side by side, with
rollers of every form capable of reducing the
most stubborn clods to dust, and of, for a time,
solidifying the loosest soil; and then mixed up
amongst these serious and costly utilities are
scattered a thousand amusing and useful
miscellanies, and not a few "notions," like Peter
Pindar's "razors, made to sell," garden-chairs
and iron network, sausage and washing machines,
and at Leeds some machines "contrived a double
debt to pay"—one day to make butter and the
next to wash the butterman's shirt! and a
thousand small knick-knacks to tempt the wives, the
daughters, and the great folks who, with more
zeal than knowledge, patronise the great show.
From pony-carriages to nutmeg-graters, from
side-saddles to bread-making machines, new
grates, new gates, and machine-driven pestles
and mortars for kitchen use.

Thirty years ago, before railroads opened up
cheap conveyance, and trained skilled mechanics
had developed the tools for making machinery,
with rare exceptions the agricultural implements
were made either on the farm or at the nearest
blacksmith's shop. If the ploughshare was
purchased, the wheelwright and the joiner did
the work the jack-of-all-trades, shepherd or
carter, could not do in the winter's evening. We
are now passing through the iron age to which
we arrived by the sheep-feeding age, and we are
rapidly arriving at the steam age of agriculture.
Dry as figures are generally considered, on this
they are eloquent. At Cambridge, in 1840,
there were thirty-six implements exhibited.
Howard showed wooden ploughs, both wheel and
swing. At the present, if you pass between
the river and the railway, you see Howard's
factory at Bedford—a magnificent quadrangle,
dedicated to the manufacture of iron ploughs,
harrows, and steam cultivators. Hundreds of
mechanics are employed there, acres are covered
with ploughs and harrows ready for despatch to
every district of England, the colonies, and the
chief agricultural countries of Europe. Lincoln,
Boston, Leiston, Ipswich in truly rural
Suffolk, and other towns too numerous to
mention, also support factories, created by the
demands of the iron age of agriculture. ln 1841,
at Liverpool, there were three hundred and
twelve implements exhibited; the department
was considered to have attained an impossible
importance in five hundred implements
at Derby. But at Leeds there were one
hundred and three stands; three hundred and
fifty-eight exhibitors, who brought to the ground
five thousand five hundred articles to show and
sell. At Derby, the catalogue was a thin
pamphlet, in large type; at Leeds the catalogue
filled four hundred closely-printed pages. But
the difference in quality was even more remarkable
than in quantity.

At Leeds stern business was the rule; the
implements, with rare exceptions, had been tried
and approved, and were to be had in any number,
and at certain prices. At Derby, in the golden
age of the Royal Society, new inventions were
as plentiful as blackberries, and amateurs
occurred on every leaf of the catalogue; in the first
five pages the names of a peer, a squire, and
an M.P., are found as inventors and
exhibitors; at Leeds new implements were very rare,
and amateurs rarely soared beyond a garden
squirt or similar innocent toy. The chief novelty
and greatest triumph was steam cultivation,
which there conquered the prejudices of
incredulous landlords; farmers had worked the
system two years before. The amateurs have
had their day, and very useful they were in
their day. The success of the annual show
now depends on the men who buy to earn a
profit out of land from men who make to realise
a profit, and on the sight-seers.

It is rather interesting to trace the sprouting
of the certain valuable mechanical aids to agriculture