ESSAYS ON FIELD HUSBANDRY. 49 



plough of very different structure from what is now in 

 use." 



He also advocates cultivating small parcels of ground, and, 

 by high manuring and tillage, obtaining great crops there- 

 from. He draws his arguments for this course from Roman 

 history, and he declares that "the old Romans lived upon 

 small shreds of land." He continues : " From scraps of 

 Roman history we may collect and conclude that a little 

 good land will support a family, and that, to make it yield 

 so much, they must have had an art and skill to which we 

 are strangers. To attain that skill which is lost, or to find 

 out something now to substitute in the room, is our proper 

 business." It is also, we may say, the "proper business" of 

 farmers in our time to find out how to obtain large crops 

 from " small shreds " of land. 



We have been greatly interested in the perusal of this 

 book, and have read it several times. It is very rare, and 

 few copies can be found. It was a treatise highly esteemed 

 at the time it was written, as the author saj^s, " The essay 

 has met with a more favorable reception than I expected, 

 ffty copies having been sent for by B. Franklin, Esq., of 

 Philadelphia, a person of merit and learning." Franklin 

 was a patron of every thing that tended to advance human, 

 knowledge, and promote the happiness of mankind. 



It is a curious illustration of how slow is the progress of 

 enlightenment, and how often is repeated the same old pro- 

 cesses in agriculture, that two years since the Essex Agri-- 

 cultural Society awarded a premium to a farmer for a process- 

 of reclaiming waste pasture-land ; which method is fully de-- 

 scribed by Eliot as followed one hundred and twenty years 

 ago. 



But I must turn from the old agriculture to the new. 



The neiv agriculture^ as has been said, is the result of 

 scientific investigations conducted within the period of a 

 little more than a third of a century ; and to Liebig are we 

 greatly indebted for systematic researches which have led to 

 a better knowledge of the scientific principles upon which 

 rests the success of the husbandman's labors. Coincident 

 with the birth of a " new chemistry," and dependent upon it 

 to a large extent, we have a new agriculture. It is not, how- 

 ever, to chemistry alone that is due all that has changed the 

 7 



