168 LANDRETH— THE NEW AGRICULTURE. [May 4 



muddy and slippery the tractive force of the engine is reduced 

 greatly, sometimes entirely nullified, at other seasons when the soil 

 is dry and dusty, the engine kicks up such a dust as to ruin its own 

 working parts. 



Some years ago I had considerable experience in endeavoring to 

 promote the direct traction system and devoted much of the three 

 successive summers in 1872, 1873 and 1874 in an endeavor to do 

 practical work. 



I worked first with a three-wheeled Scott-Thompson engine with 

 solid rubber tires, six inches thick for the purpose of increasing the 

 tractive force, which tires flattened out under the weight of the en- 

 gine as does a cat's foot. The two driving wheels were of a sixteen- 

 inch face having clamped upon them segmental lags or blocks of 

 rubber; as the whoeels revolved these rubbers flattened under the 

 five-ton weight of the engine and gave a tractive grasp of the soil 

 •of quite four hundred superficial inches under each wheel. I also 

 worked with a four-wheeled rigid-tire engine, the periphery of the 

 'wheel fitted with angle irons to increase the tractive power. • 



Succeeding these trials, or in the year 1887, General Roy Stone 

 in my farm wheel-wright shop at Bloomdale invented and erected a 

 steam digger of ten spades, a system established on a horizontal shaft, 

 the spades jabbing into the earth directly in the rear of the engine. 

 This required such an immense amount of power that we turned to 

 something better ; this being a rapidly revolving shaft actuating fifty 

 or more cutting or chopping knives slicing off slivers of earth by a 

 downward centrifugal movement just as a wood planing machine by a 

 horizontal centrifugal movement chips off slivers of wood. These 

 fifty knives, each on a distinct arm eighteen inches long, were fas- 

 tened to a horizontal shaft revolving rapidly, throwing forward the 

 various arms in centrifugal movement, the knives at the ends of the 

 arms going down into the earth in oblique and curved direction, 

 throwing the earth six feet behind the machine as a hay tedder 

 throws back the grass, the knives always keeping open a broad trench 

 beneath and behind them. 



The land, when thus worked, was left as a perfect garden bed, 

 needing no further working because it formed a bed of chippings ten 



