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XVI. — Report on the Exhibition and Trial of Implements at the 

 Salisbury Meeting. By C. Wren Hoskyns. 



The steady annual increase in the number of implements exhibited 

 at the country meetings of our Society, especially since Steam- 

 machinery has happily formed so large and important a class, had 

 begun not only to multiply but very materially to change the 

 duties, and the attending responsibilities, of those to whom the 

 Society committed, year after year, the necessary arrangement of 

 the trials ; when the proposal submitted to the Council by the 

 principal manufacturing firms, viz. that the Trial of implements 

 should take place only once in three years (reducing the two 

 intervening meetings to mere exhibitions), was met by a counter- 

 resolution from the Society, the adoption of which has led to 

 the most useful results. 



We owe to the late Mr. Pusey the classified arrangement — • 

 following what may be called the "natural order" in agriculture 

 — which formed the basis of this resolution, and now governs the 

 implement trials at the Society's country meetings, the system 

 being that of a threefold division of implements and machinery, 

 arranged in the order of their use: 1. In the preparation of the 

 soil; 2. In tlie treatment of the crop, from sowing to gathering; 

 and 3. In the conversion of the produce, and barnwork. 



This triple division, favouring, in the accidental identity of 

 number, the proposal which indirectly led to it, by occasioning, 

 in fact, a triennial trial in each of the respective classes above 

 named, commenced its course in 1856 at the Chelmsford meeting, 

 and reached its second year, viz. that of the trials of implements 

 applied to the crop, at Salisbury, where it, of course, included the 

 Reaping-machines, leaving the steam-ploughing as the only excep- 

 tion (made for obvious public reasons) to the plan, which, inde- 

 pendently of its merit as a systematised arrangement, has brought 

 timely relief to a rapidly-increasing pressure on the stewards and 

 judges, likely to have proved injurious, in tendency, to the value 

 of the trials themselves. 



There is, however, undoubtedly, one disadvantage which still 

 applies to this as to every other mode of carrying out such trials : 

 that, whereas the use of agricultural implements belongs to all the 

 seasons in succession, an annual trial can take place only at 07ie ; 

 and as this will of necessity be that in which farm business is 

 most at leisure, it is of course likely to be the one most generally 

 unsuitable for the use, and consequently for the accurate trial, of 

 any. The reaping-machines must be launched upon a half-green 

 rye crop, generally, for some unexplained reason, very thin, and 

 very foul, to prove their capacity for cutting a field of strong 

 ripe wheat, a trial sufficient, perhaps, for general, but inadequate 



