Tlic Past, Present, and Future of Scottish Agriculture 



to poke up bears in our travelling menageries, 

 which he plied vigorously ; so that with 

 standing and starting, and twisting and 

 turning and tumbling, the bovine rout formed 

 altogether such a tumultuous mob (as they 

 would say in Australia) as rendered the post 

 of ploughman no sinecure, and made plough- 

 ing, in the proper sense of the term, im- 

 possible. In the absence of anything like 

 waggons or carts, the mode of conveying 

 what dung there was to the field was in 

 baskets, strung across a horse's back, which, 

 latterly, gave place to the improvement of 

 the " sled," a thing somewhat like the body 

 of an ill-made cart without the wheels, which 

 might be capable of containing a pretty large 

 modern barrowful, and was dragged to the 

 land by a horse yoked to it by bramble or 

 willow withes. Crops of all descriptions, 

 whether green or white, were sown broadcast, 

 year after year, on the same spot. 



Whether plants of the same kind, grown 

 successively in the same place, impoverish 

 the soil by abstracting from it those ingre- 

 dients which constitute the proper food of the 

 plant, gradually rendering the matrix unpro- 

 ductive of that particular kind of crop, or if 

 the plant thus perennially cultivated //.' situ 

 leaves behind it something, totally dis- 

 agreeing with plants of the same species, but 

 not at all oftensive to those of a different 

 kind ; or whether these two hypotheses are 

 combined to form a well-known practical re- 

 sult, still among agriculturists, in some degi'ee 

 forms an open question. The second position 

 proposed by De Candolle, it is true, is not 

 now in favour, but there can be little dispute 

 regarding the first, as it is well ascertained 

 that plants do take up certain substances 

 from the soil proper for their growth, and on 

 this fact, indeed, is mainly founded the whole 

 practice of manuring. IJut none of these 

 vexed theoretical questions disquieted our 

 agricultural forefathers. They continued to 

 jog on contentedly in the old road. There is 

 a story of one of these primitive farmers in- 

 dustriously engaged in the important opera- 

 tion of taking manure to the land. Down 

 one side of each horse hung a basket con- 

 taining dung, which was balanced on the 



other side by another basket filled with 

 stones. An intelligent neighbour passing 

 by at the time criticised the operation, 

 and recommended an improvement in the 

 details. " Could you not," said he, " fill 

 both baskets with dung, which would thus 

 balance each other ?" " Na, na," cried 

 the indignant farmer, " I'll dae naething o' 

 the kin' — my father did it this way, an' my 

 father's father did it, an' my father's father's 

 father did it, an' I'll daet tae." We do not 

 mean to say that all the farmers of those days 

 venerated antient institutions and sacred 

 custom so highly as this conservative and 

 orthodox agriculturist, but certainly there 

 were, in cropping, no troublesome or vexa- 

 tious deviations perpetrated from the good 

 old rule. 



The small portion of the occupancy situated 

 immediately around the steading, thus devoted 

 to the plough, was called intown or infield, 

 while the outside portion, abandoned to the 

 catde, was called outfield. Had the drop- 

 pings from the cattle been preserved and 

 applied to the infield, the vis stercoris might, 

 to a certain degree, have obviated the neces- 

 sity of change of crop. But these animals, 

 all except the " mairts," were permitted to 

 roam at will on their own domain, on which 

 there was little of any green thing except a 

 luxuriant "bob" here and there around each 

 dropping, which no animal of the same kind 

 would look at. 



As nature was left to herself in the outfield, 

 so likewise in the infield was she neither 

 coaxed nor coerced. Our worthy predecessors 

 did not bother their heads about vexatious 

 theories. Their whole " practice of agricul- 

 ture," too, consisted in burying a cow's dung 

 in the earth and casting seed over it to spring, 

 grow, and mature as it pleased God. There 

 was uniformly a most luxuriant crop on the 

 land. Nature, never idle, sees that the 

 ground shall be duly filled, and takes care 

 that it be with the crop best suited to the 

 soil. The constituent element of the par- 

 ticular artificial crop perennially committed 

 to the land might, indeed, become exhausted, 

 but the soil has various elements in its capa- 

 cious stores; and consequently there appeared 



