at the Salishiry Meeting, 1857. 425 



and attitude of mere criticizing interest, somewhat difficult indeed 

 either to accommodate, or, in the language of the police, to 

 "keep back," so that the ploughs, and Avorkmen attending the 

 machinery, might have room to act, but far from exhibiting the 

 ready and impulsive conviction of a thing accomplished, that 

 had been noticed the year before. * 



Of the actual trials themselves, it is hardly necessary to say 

 more than will be found in the brief report of the judges. To say 

 much is impossible. Such a soil, on such a situation, hardened 

 to such a condition not only by its own flinty nature but by the 

 long-continued influence of one of the most extraordinary seasons 

 that has ever been known, were enough to render any trial prac- 

 tically abortive. But no one who saw the work performed, even 

 under these adverse circumstances, by Mr. Fowler's plough, could 

 doubt that, in his case at least (not to the least disparage- 

 ment of the other competitors), stesun-jjlotighi/iff, as such, had 

 attained a degree of excellence comparable in point of execution 

 even with the best horse-work. As to the relative economy, 

 there seems little reason to doubt that the calculations arrived at 

 by Mr. Amos and others the year before, at the adjourned trial at 

 Boxted Lodge, were sufficiently near the truth to leave a very in- 

 considerable diffijrence in favour of horse-work. And if this be 

 true as a comparison merely taken acre for acre, or hour for hour, 

 every one who knows the supreme value of time in the autumn 

 months on clay soils, and the difference, in capacity of da7/-ivork, 

 between a horse and a steam-engine, must be aware that a new 

 multiplier, at least of 2, if not more, may be placed to the credit 

 of the steam-engine, regarded as an available power, or auxiliary, 

 when work is pressing, and when, according to a well-known 

 poetical authority, the best, or ratlier only method to lengthen 

 the shortening days is to " steal a few hours from night." 



But nobody had doubted, even so far back as before the well- 

 known experiments of Lord Willoughby D'Eresby, that plough- 

 ing, as such, could be accomplished by the use of a stationary 

 steam-engine, instead of horses ; and the trials made in this matter 

 long before the Royal Agricultural Society took up the question 

 and announced their premium, were not only matter of familiar 

 knowledge, but were, in a certain sense, obsolete ; and a secondary 

 stage of inquiry had begun to grow up, viz. looking at the 

 plough itself as essentially a horse-implement, on the one hand, 

 and at the whole career and history of the steam-engine on the 

 other, in its applications as a substitute for horse and manual 

 power, — whether the reiterated endeavour to employ it through 

 the agency of the plough (and the argument applies equally to 

 the attempts made with the spade), was not, in fact, assuming the 

 practicability of a combination Apposed to the true mechanical 



