THE FARMER'S MAGAZINE. 



459 



The contest between the Goths and Moors in Spain 

 was not less injurious to the race of the Spaniards. The 

 result of competition in war betwixt men is very ditierent 

 from that of natural selection of organism in the wilder- 

 ness. In war, when the soldiers are not raised by bounties, 

 it is the bravest and strongest who are destroyed. 



" In hairst at the shearing, nae younkers are jeering, 

 The bandsters are Ijart and ruiikled and gray ; 



The flowers o' the forest, that fought aye the foremost. 

 The prime o' our land are cauld i' the clay." 



In the Marlborough wars it was not uncommon for a 

 regiment to be fought into cowards, the bravest all kiUed 

 and the dross left. In the Moorish wars of Spain, it is 

 Baid 3,700 pitched battles were fought duiing a period of 

 pretty Tegular fighting of nearly 700 years. At the end 

 of tlie lengthened Eoman rule of some 400 years, the 

 Peninsula, from the long period of comparative quiet, is 

 stated to have reached a population of from forty to fifty 

 millions. The Gothic conquest, and the sequent Moorish 

 wars, reduced the Spanish population to about 13 millions, 

 and destroyed nearly the whole of the land irrigation by 

 which the south of Spain had been rendered so fertile as 

 to support so great a population. Those long-continued 

 wars account for the Spanish want of energy in modern 

 times, and it only required the drain of the most enter- 

 prising of the remainder in the brigandage expeditious to 

 Central and South America, to give to Spanish energy the 

 finishing blow. Although also under other disjunctive 

 influences, the subject of contention during the Moorish 

 wars was chiefly religion. That cause of destruction 

 in our more enlightened times seems on the decline, 

 and now we have the noble cause of liberty, political and 

 industrial. Here it unfortunately happens that extended 

 political influence to the masses may lead to crushing 

 despotism. We have France before us. To gaard against 

 this the utmost care is required, and an extension of our 

 volunteer system seems the only safe way of warding it off 

 This system of advanced liberty would appear only practi- 

 cable mth the most advanced portion of the Teutonic race. 

 A good working people-represented government can only 

 exist where no priesthood have controlling power. I cannot 

 beJieve that a representative Government can work aJvan- 

 tageously with a population under priest influence, such as 

 the Romish Church, the confessional and religion-monopoly 

 afford, Let Italy and France look to this ! Excepting in 

 the case of France under the first republic, it is only Teutons 

 who as yet have protested against Priest domination. 



neering, were listened to — men with minds of one idea, bounded 

 to timber ships, and ropes and sails, and ropes-ends— as fixed and 

 limited as the instincts of the lower animals. Let any one read 

 the recent work of my friend, John Scott Russell, " Thb Fliet 

 OF THE FuTUKB : Ibon OR WOOD?" and they will see to whose 

 incapable hands the safety of the nation has been entrusted— 

 millions of money tlirown away upon comparatively useless ships. 

 In the statements of Sir Howard Douglass, exposed by Scott 

 Russell, they will find ignorance and misrepresentation com- 

 bined. The pitiful figure made by our navy before the Sebastopol 

 and Cronstadt forts was not even enough to convert bigoted 

 imbecility in place and command. It was rather atinoying 

 to find the French first following out my plans; but what 

 else CDuld be expected from our sjstem of mismanagement? 

 The French too have one great advantage over the British 

 in being free from class division. The whole people feel as 

 one body of highly patriotic character. This we would do 

 well to imitate; and there is only one way of doing so, by 

 extension of the suffrage, and extension of our volunteer system 

 to the working classes, with every volunteer an elector. There is 

 also a nobility of cliaracter, a natural politeness, a gentlemanli- 

 ness, extending to the poorest rank in France, not in word only, 

 but in deed, which the writer himself has experienced. This we 

 have much need to imitate. In return, the French should imitate 

 the British in forethought, calm deliberate action, and steady 

 indomitable perseverance. It is well that the British have dogged 

 persistence to meet the French clan. 



A cnrious system of war existed among the native popu- 

 lation of New Holland pre\ious to its occupation by the 

 British, which accounts for the low grade even of savage 

 life in those regions. It was the gentlemanly or chivalrio 

 code of fighting, for each party alternately to present the 

 top of their head to receive a knock from their opponent's 

 club, tiU one of the antagonist parties had enough. ^Vhen- 

 cver there was a head without a great block of thick bon^ 

 covering and protecting, but crushing the brain and pre- 

 venting its expansion, the owner was killed oft' hand, or 

 his brain so stunned or addled as to render him disquali- 

 fied to be a Thales, Numa, or Moses. This practice, in 

 pretty constant operation for a lengthened period of timei 

 would act in a similar manner to modify the race, though 

 in a ditierent direction to my theory of natural selection, 

 and must have served to stultify — lower the mental capa- 

 city of the race. The same may have operated in a less 

 degree in a country nearer home — " With Ihn Sprig of SJdl- 

 lelagh." It is stated that the scull of the celebrated Scot, 

 George Buchanan, was examined after liis death, and 

 found to be as thin as a wafer. In Germany, whence the 

 British race derive their mental as well as physical stamina, 

 mothers tie an elastic roU of about IJ inch diameter of 

 feather, wool, &c., round the head of their children at the 

 brow, to prevent them in their numerous falls in infancy 

 from addling their superior brains. Those of our fox- 

 hunters who tumble as often as the children, and who may 

 have brains worth protecting, should follow the same 

 practice. Pateick Matthew. 



Gourdie Hill, Eirol, March I8th, 1861. 



SOVEREIGN DRILL PLOUGH.—This new implement 

 which, like the reaping machine, is a return gift, in exchange 

 for the plough, from the New World to the Old, is the 

 invention of Mr, L. Sovereign, of Western Canada. Its 

 powers were tested on Thursday in a field near Peckham-rye, 

 when five furrows were made at one time by a single plough 

 drawn by two horses, which at the same time sowed with bar- 

 ley and clover, turning the furrows clean over the seeds so as 

 to cover them safely from birds. This implement, which 

 weighs no more than 5 cwt., is as rough and ready as a bush 

 harrow, and, like all colonial machines, has no mechanism 

 about it that a common tool-box will not suffice to repair. It 

 consists of five ploughshares of cast steel, light and strong, 

 placed transversely on a frame of five longitudinal beams. 

 This frame is suspended on three wheels, two on one side and 

 the other running in the furrow. The ordinary Ime of 

 draught in ploughs is thus modified, and the friction 

 of the weight carried off in the revolution of the wheels. 

 Two boxes are fixed on the frame, one for larger seeds (from 

 beans to wheat), the other for grass seed. The distribution 

 is regulated by very simple mechanism — the mere turning of 

 a screw by the driver acts by a wedge on a plate, which de- 

 fines any given quantity to the acre ; while a copper slide to 

 each conductor closes or opens it according to the number of 

 rows renuiaite to be sown. The advantageous simplicity of 

 this arrangement will be evident to every practical man. A 

 pair of light harrows were fixed behind, and thus completed 

 the three processes of ploughing, sowing, and harrowing at 

 one operation. The ploughshares are removable, and give 

 place to scarifiers or cultivators where requisite, so that the im- 

 plement may be termed a universal tool for all tillage purposes. 

 It worked admirably on a wet and heavy soil, making straight 

 furrows, and laying them over evenly ; on lighter soils it seems 

 to be extensively used. The plough tested was manufactured 

 by Mary Wedlake and Co., from models supplied by Mr. 

 Sovereign. — Post, 



