MECHANICS AND USEFUL ARTS. 85 



notions are correct, abundant harvests of grain may be taken off the land, 

 year after year, without any addition of manure at all, provided only a 

 sufficient quantity of labor be judiciously bestowed in pulverizing its 

 substance. 



But here, again, if improved comminution of the soil, and not increased 

 manuring, is the thing required, a great revolution must be made in a very 

 important particular. A new form of apparatus must be contrived for 

 attaining the end. The plough now in use is merely a barbarous implement, 

 planned in rude days, for enabling horses to do man's work. The spade lifts 

 up the soil in mass, turns it over, and leaves it evenly spread as a loosened, 

 porous bed; but the ploughshare, on the other hand, squeezes down and 

 condenses one part, while it loosens and turns up another. It is simply a 

 compromise of accurate principle, for the sake of insuring the horizontally 

 acting service of the horse. It is a matter of familiar knowledge that spade- 

 husbandry answers very much better than plough-tillage, whenever it can be 

 employed. 



Spade-husbandry cannot, however, be much in use in these luxurious 

 days; human labor has now too high a value in the markets of the world for 

 this to be the case. Some agent must therefore be sought that shall combine 

 in itself the skill of the biped and the strength of the quadruped, and that 

 shall also admit of economical application: in other words, the animal 

 drudge must be exchanged for a mechanical one. That potent slave of the 

 wonderful lamp of science, who never fails to accomplish all that the pos- 

 sessor of the radiant spell enjoins, must be summoned to the agriculturist's 

 aid; steam, ever so ready to transform coarse materials into fine, must now 

 be put in commission to grind down the soil, as it has before ground down 

 hosts of stubborn things, m order that nourishing grain may multiply as fast 

 as hungry mouths. 



Assuming that steam has once been enlisted in the service of agriculture, 

 the consideration yet remains of how its enormous power may best be em- 

 ployed. Clearly, it must not be harnessed to the obsolete plough, as some 

 have thought; it would be as much out of place, if set to drag, as a horse 

 would be if put to dig. Man works best with an upward lift, the horse with 

 an onward pull; but the genius of steam is rotary. It likes to have the 

 resistance it is to conquer placed at the circumference of a wheel, the spokes 

 of which it is allowed to drive. The steam cultivator must wear the form of 

 a compact locomotive, carrying behind it a revolving cylinder, fully armed 

 with case-hardened claws of steel. As this machine travels onwards, it must 

 cut out its trench as the mole digs its burrow, and it must cast back into this 

 trench the mould that results from its abrading influence, "comminuted, 

 aerated, and inverted," all at one stroke, just as the "worthy pioneer that 

 works i' the ground so fast," flings behind him the earth his restless claws 

 have scraped away. 



The author of Talpa foretells the speedy approach of the time when the 

 children of the present generation shall be as familiar with the spectacle of 

 locomotives stalking about over the surface of the fields, on agricultural 

 Avork intent, as we are with the sight of ships of a couple of thousands of 

 tons burden, driving themselves, duck-like, through the water with their 

 invisible web-feet. Already the prophecy begins to be realized; and, on 

 behalf of our bread-feeding, fast-multiplying race, we venture to express a 

 hope that the consummation will speedily arrive. Chambers' s Journal. 



8 



