crop; hemp and flax also were common crops;
and carrots, cabbages, turnips, and rape, were
grown for the kitchen. Clover, and probably
also turnips, came to England in the reign of
Charles the First, through Sir Richard Weston,
who had been ambassador to the Elector Palatine
and King of Bohemia, and who wrote a
discourse on the husbandry of Brabant and
Flanders. In sixteen 'eighty-four we have the
first notice of turnips as a food for sheep; but
even at the time when George the Third came to
the throne, clover and turnips, essential as they
are to the modern farming system, were scarcely
cultivated by our common farmers in the north.
It was at the end of the Stuart time, when
we first begin to hear of the sheep eating
turnips, that potatoes began to attract attention.
Raleigh, who brought the plant from Virginia,
had established it in Ireland, thence it had
passed into Lancashire, where, at the end of
the reign of Charles the Second, we learn " they
are very numerous, and now they begin to
spread all the kingdom over. They are a
pleasant food, boiled or roasted, and eaten with
butter and sugar."

Scientific farming may be said to have begun
in the first year of the last century, when Mr.
Jethro Tull, a Berkshire gentleman, reasoned to
himself that plants feed on minute particles of
earth taken up by their rootlets, and, therefore,
began sowing his crops in rows or drills, so
wide apart as to admit of tillage by plough and
hoe in the intervals. His purpose was to break
up the soil into what he called " pasture" for
the roots, and to eradicate the weeds which
would steal part of " this terrestrial matter."
He formed his land into broad ridges, with two
or three rows of his crop upon each, then used
horse-hoeing between the ridges and hand-hoeing
between the rows. Jethro Tull was a
generation ahead of his time, and his book upon
Horse-hoeing Husbandry, produced vehement
controversy. But in our own day his reputation
has come up and ripened. His book
appeared in seventeen 'thirty-one, eight years
after the formation of our first Agricultural
Society—" the Society of Improvers on the
Knowledge of Agriculture in Scotland." The
Earl of Stair, one of its most active members,
is said to have been the first man who grew
turnips in Scotland. He had a turnip head.
But this society also was before its time, and
lived only for twenty years. Mr. Maxwell,
another of its active members, who gave
lectures upon agriculture, published at its death a
volume of its Select Transactions, and in that
volume occurs the first mention of a threshing
machine. It was patented, worked by water
power, and recommended by the society as
enabling one man to do the work of six.

The Royal Dublin Society, founded in 1737,
had for one object the encouragement of
agriculture. It still holds an annual cattle show,
and has of late years established an Order of
Associates in Agriculture. Holders of it are
entitled to wear blue blossoms of speedwell in
their button-holes.

Population increased, commerce and the arts
added continually to the wealth and power of
the nation, farms were enlarged, and so much
new land was brought into use, that whereas
before the reign of George the Third the whole
number of enclosure bills that had been passed
was only two hundred and forty- four, there
were passed within that reign more than three
thousand. In seventeen 'seventy-seven the
Bath and West of England Society, for the
encouragement of " Agriculture, Arts, Manufacture,
and Commerce," came into existence, and
began to hold its meetings. It met to exhibit
breeding stock and implements, and offered
premiums for reports on subjects affecting
agriculture in the West of England. Six years
later, that is to say, in seventeen 'eighty-three,
the " Highland and Agricultural Society of
Scotland" was instituted, for the encouragement
of Highland Agriculture, Fisheries, and
Commerce. This was the year in which the
country was relieved of the baneful pressure of
the American War. It was the time, also, of
Robert Bakewell's fame as an improver of the
breeds of sheep and cattle. His improvement
upon the long-horned cattle has been superseded
by the application of his own principles
to the short-horn or Durham breed; but the
new race of sheep that he perfected, the
Leicesters, still adds to the wealth of the country.
The Bakewells of Cirencester go a step farther,
and are for the intellectual breeding of an
improved race of farmers.

What is called alternate husbandry, alternation
of green crops with grain crops, came also
in those days into use. In seventeen 'eighty-
eight the Swede turnip was accidentally
discovered, and soon was in general cultivation.
Swing ploughs and threshing machines were no
longer rarities. Five years after the discovery
of the Swede turnip a " National Board of
Agriculture" was established, and remained
alive for twenty years, collecting statistical
information and drawing up special surveys,
documents which would have been more
serviceable if they had been less extensive and less
expensive. Agriculture next throve upon blood
manure in the wars of the French Revolution.

Seventeen 'ninety-five brought us a deficient
harvest, and Napoleon's cutting off of our
supply of foreign grain. The price of wheat
was nearly doubled. Upon this followed the
Bank Restriction Act, suspending cash
payments, and introducing unlimited speculation
upon credit. The high price of wheat stimulated
farmers to produce as much of it as
possible, by improving arable land, reclaiming
wastes, and ploughing up their pastures; the
green crop of the new system of alternate
husbandry more than compensating for the pasturages
thus withdrawn. This lasted for twenty
years. Wheat that in the preceding twenty years
had sold for less than fifty shillings a quarter, rose
till in eighteen hundred and twelve it came to
one hundred and twenty-six shillings. The
people suffered but the farmers throve, and
agriculture made rapid advances. Within that period