198 Professor VVhewell on the Mathematical Exposition 



This depends on the suppositions aheady mentioned, that 

 there are capitalists ready and able to employ capital whenever 

 the usnal profit can be made of it. 



The application of fresh capital to land already cultivated, 

 is in its eiFects precisely the same as the extension of cultivation 

 to uncultivated lands. Thus if by an annual expenditure of 

 100, the farmer can obtain a produce of 150 on a given piece 

 of ground, and if profits be 10 per cent., the surplus produce 

 being 50, 10 will go to the farmer and 40 to the landlord as rent. 

 If now a mode became known, by Vhich an additional capital of 

 100 employed on the same ground will give an additional produce 

 of 115, this capital will be so applied, and of the resulting produce 

 the farmer will take 10 and the landlord 5 : and the result will 

 be the same to all parties, as if another piece of ground had been 

 cultivated with a capital of 100 and a produce of 115. We may 

 consider the acre as consisting of two acres, one superimposed, 

 on the other ; one cultivated with a capital of 100 and produce of 

 150, the other with a capital of 100 and produce of 115. These 

 successive appplications of capital to the same land, are called 

 b> Mill, doses of capital ; and all that can be said of soils of 

 different fertility, may be said also of doses of agriculturally em- 

 ployed capital which give different returns. 



This however is not a necessary way of stating the subject : 

 for we may with equal propriety consider the case in which the 

 additional capital is employed, as a case of capital 200, produce 

 265, profit 20, rent 45. The introduction of the gradation of 

 doses is an artifice which is unnecessary, if we consider the 

 whole capital and the whole produce on each part of the soil. 



8. There is a third principle which has sometimes been in- 

 troduced into the reasonings on this subject, which seems not to 

 1)6 necessarily or universally true, but which will be assumed 

 in some of the succeeding speculations, because it has been 



