PROGRESS OF ENGLISH AGRICULTURE. £13 



provement of implements, and still more by the improvement of those who 

 use them. " It ia well known," says Sir John Sinclair, " that the best cul- 

 tivated districts are those which possess the greatest facility of internal com- 

 munication, without which agriculture languishes in the most fruitful soil, and 

 with it the most ungrateful soil soon becomes fertile." The effect which rail- 

 roads have produced upon farming is a signal illustration of the justice of this 

 remark, for without their aid the larger portion of the recent progress would 

 have been impossible. They furnish cheap and rapid conveyance for goods 

 which were too bulky to admit of free interchange in the days of horse-power 

 — for corn and cattle, coal, iron, and timber, implements and machinery, oil- 

 cake and artificial manures — all that a farmer has to sell or wants to buy 

 — and, above all, for the farmer himself, who brings home with him new ideas 

 as well as new inventions. The railways practically- converted distant rural 

 parishes into the suburbs of towns, and thus inoculated them with a spirit of 

 inquiry and commercial enterprise which could never have existed under pack- 

 horse or wagon communication. Wesley, who had a wi(.:e experience of the 

 different classes in England, thought the tenantry the most ignorant, stupid, 

 and unfeeling part of the community. " In general," he added, " their life 

 is supremely dull, and it is usually unhappy, too ; for of all people in the 

 kingdom, they are the most discontented, seldom satisfied either with God or 

 man." Wilkes said that, reversing Pope's Maxim, they held that " What- 

 ever is, is t/>?-0'.^." Wesley, however, was mistaken both in supposing that 

 husbandry was a dull occupation, and in imagining that the grumbling of 

 the husbandman, which was chiefly designed to keep down rents, was the real 

 measure of their discontent ; but, taken as a body, they neither read nor 

 thought, were sluggish in their minds, and the slaves of an antiquated routine. 

 The suddenness with which they have started from their lethargy, and with 

 which the many have displayed the aptitude which formerly was the preroga- 

 tive of a few, is without a parallel in the annals of farming. 



Tlio starting point of the new era may be dated from the years 1837 and 

 1838, which were signalized by the foundation of the Royal Agricultural So- 

 ciety of England. This now famous association was suggested in a pamphlet 

 published in 1837 by the late Henry Handlcy, M. P., a fine specimen of a 

 Lincolnshire squii-o — a good sportsman, an excellent judge of stock, and cul- 

 tivating his own estate with more intelligence and success than was usual at 

 that time among his class. The first annual encampment of the society took 

 place at Oxford in 1839, and its first Journal was published in 1840 under the 

 admirable editorship of the late Philip Pusey, a lively and forcible writer, 

 and a most zealous farmer, who to the day of his death in 1854, devoted his 

 time, his talents, and b'a fortune to promoting the improvement and record- 

 ing the progress of his favorite science. He was an example of that delightful 

 combination of scholarship and practical energy which is so common in Eng- 

 land, and he exercised the double influence of an accomplished gentleman and 

 an enlightened agriculturist. 



In every institution which meets with distinguished success, results are 

 always produced which were not anticipated by its originators. Thus it hap- 

 pened that, when the Agricultural Society was founded, not one of tiie pro- 

 moters foresaw the importance of the mechanical department. In the ten 

 sections of the charter of incorporation defining the objects of the association, 

 " implements " are only incidentally referred to as one of the subjects to 

 which men of science were to be encouraged to pay attention, in a miscellane- 

 ous paragraph, which includes "the construction of farm-buildings," "the 

 application of chemistry to the general purposes of agriculture," " the des- 

 truction of insects injurious to vegetable life," " and the eradication of 

 weeds.". At Oxford a few manufacturers saw an opening for obtaining cus- 

 tomers, and found their way to the show-yard in spite of the difiiculties from 

 the want of that cheap conveyance which is now common to the whole kirg- 

 dom. One gold medal for a collection of implements, three silver medals, and 



