118 Implements and Tillage. 



with the older forms. As long ago as the forties, Wren 

 Hoskyns, charming writer but rash prophet, condemned the 

 plough. In the Chronicles of a Clay Farm we read, " I say 

 the plough has sentence of death written on it hecaiise it is 

 essentially imperfect. . . . Why poke an instrument seven 

 or eight inches under the clod to tear it up in the mass by 

 main iovce for otiier instruments to act oti, toiling and treading 

 it down in ponderous attempts at cultivation wholesale ? " 



That was written in the early days of steam cultivation, and 

 the author's idea of the future of tillage was " a steam-driven 

 circular cultivator," which was to cut its way across the land, 

 throwing up behind it a " perfectly comminuted seed bed as 

 fine or as coarse as the engineer required." 



This, and all other attempts at machinery to produce a seed 

 bed direct from whole land at one operation, even if successful, 

 would have a very lin.ited scope. They leave out of reasoning 

 the prime factor in cultivation — the natural effects of changes 

 of moisture and temperature. No seed bed was ever made by 

 force to compare with that produced ])y a few turns of the 

 harrows on a well-weathered winter furrow. We actually 

 economise labour by spreading the operations of tillage over 

 a long period, each one at its proper season, whereas with any 

 form of " complete tillage machine " all the work would be 

 crowded into a few favourable days. The plough, then, is still 

 the main implement of tillage and is likely to remain so. 

 There cannot be said to be anj'^ important improvements in 

 ploughs of recent years, and as long ago as the Hull meeting 

 of 1873 the best ploughs described in an exhaustive report 

 were practically the same as those of the present day. At one 

 time it was predicted that the steel chill digging ploughs would 

 supersede the older forms. But Messrs. Ransomes, Sims & 

 Jefferies, who courteously answered some questions I asked 

 them, tell me that in their experience the digging plough has 

 not made any headway in the last decade. Where they are 

 generally used I think it is more from the fact that the detach- 

 able and very strong point of the share in these ploughs will 

 stand in rocky ground better than the ordinary chilled cast 

 iron shares, than from any superiority in the form of the 

 furrow made. My own experience is that the digging plough 

 is most useful for summer fallowing. The wide share cuts 

 all the thistles, and a fourteen-inch furrow is no small gain 

 over one of ten inches in a day's work. But in ploughing for 

 spring corn after sheep, and still more in ley ploughing, their 

 great fault is that they produce a furrow which harrows into 

 a very uneven tilth, large clods, mixed with fine mould, which 

 with a drying east wind soon become unbreakable. Turning 

 to the older forms, I have often been struck by the fact that 



