PLOUGHING. 147 



" heavy, ill-formed and ill-going," the ploughman obliged to walk 

 wholly on the unploughed land, resting nearly all his weight 

 upon the handles, his body making an angle of forty-five degrees 

 with the horizon. Three or four inches of the furrow next to 

 the unploughed land were cut three inches deeper than the rest 

 of it, though the surface was left looking quite well. 



And in connection with the mention of this heavy Hertford- 

 shire plough may be contrasted the first great, yet overdone 

 improvement, viz. : the Rotherham plough, weighing only 1^ 

 cwt. Such facts go to show the entirely unsettled theories of 

 those times. It was for James Small, a Scotch mechanic, to 

 invent the iron mould-board and attach it to his swing plough, 

 giving it such weight and power as to make it a general favorite 

 from 1764 nearly down to our times. The name of this inventor 

 should not be forgotten. His plough would look rude, perhaps, 

 at the Essex County cattle shows, but it delighted the Dalkeith 

 Farming Society, to turn from the old Scotch plough, requiring 

 a force of 16 cwt. to draw it through an " old ley," to Small's 

 plough, doing the same work with " a force of from 9 to 10 cwt." 

 Yet all this while even James Small was no mathematician, and 

 it remained for later times to apply scientific principles to this 

 noble instrument. 



It must have been gratifying to an American fifty years ago, 

 to discover the fact that the famous Scotch plough of Ferguson, 

 which obtained so much celebrity from Mr. Loudon's praises 

 bestowed upon it — (he declared that it was superior to any 

 similar plough known in England) — was constructed upon the 

 principles before referred to, laid down by Mr. Jefferson in his 

 celebrated report "on the true shape of the mould-board," 

 addressed by him to the French Institute, in which he showed 

 from mathematical data that it should be in the form of a " gentle, 

 hollow curve," while the ploughs in use were generally " more 

 full and short, not raising the earth gradually like a wave, but 

 throwing it over at once." It is known that Mr. Jefferson left 

 France for America in 1789, so that his plough was invented 

 after Small's, and was an improvement upon it. 



I have already said that ploughs constructed upon the princi- 

 ples suggested by Mr. Jefferson were faulty. Was this the effect 

 of his mathematics, or of the method of applying them ? Or is 

 it not more probable that a perfect plough would grow out of a 



