266 NOTICES OF THE MEETINGS [Feb. 25, 
valuable, and would compare very successfully with the practice of 
the present day. They held it to be bad farming to plough when 
the ground was wet, ‘‘ Lutosam terram ne tangito.” Another maxim 
was never to plough with an unequal furrow, ‘‘Sulco vario ne ares,’ — 
and a third was never to plough with a crooked furrow,— he who 
did so was said to prevaricate, ‘‘ Arator nist incurvus prevaricatur.” 
This expression was afterwards used in the forum, and the same 
meaning attached to it as in the present day. Let these maxims be 
posted in our market places, and no farmers who read would gainsay 
them ; and yet how often do we see them disregarded in our fields. 
Oxen were generally used, and always harnessed two abreast, and 
the quantity of work done in a yoking was from 1 jugerum (= .618 
of an acre) to 14 jugerum. Pliny mentions having seen in Egypt 
ploughs drawn by cows, their calves skipping by their sides, and in 
more than one instance a team composed of an ass and an old 
woman harnessed together. The Roman plough was minutely de- 
scribed by Virgil, and closely resembles the ploughs used in Valencia 
and some parts of France at the present day. In the Vetusta 
Monumenta (Vol. VI. see Bayeux Tapestry, A.D. 1032) drawings 
may be seen of wheel ploughs worked by two horses abreast. Much 
information on the condition of the plough in the medieval period 
may be obtained from the works of Sir Anthony Fitzherbert (1532), 
*« Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and a farmer of forty years, 
standing,” of Heresbach (1570),—of Walter Blith, whose ‘ Im- 
prover Improved” appeared in 1652 — of Hartlib (1652), and of 
Gervase Markham (1631), from which we learn, that turn-rest 
ploughs were commonly used in Kent, that the sub-soil plough was 
then known, and that on many of the light lands in Norfolk and 
Suffolk it was the practice, by using light ploughs with one horse, to 
get over two and three acres in the course of the day. 
The great improvements in the plough took place in the latter 
half of the eighteenth century, and are due to Small, Wilkie, Fin- 
laison, and others —: who introduced iron mould-boards of a different 
shape, and generally improved the mechanics of the implement. 
Ploughs now are made either with one or with two wheels, and 
these are known as ‘‘ wheel-ploughs” or they are made without 
any wheels at all, in which case they are termed ‘‘ swing- ploughs.” 
The former are generally used in the southern and the latter in the 
northern districts. In the use of the one, ‘“‘ more judgment than 
skill’ is required, in the other ‘‘ more skill than judgment ;” with 
the wheel-plough, more depends upon the implement and less upon 
the man ;— with the swing-plough, more depends upon the man and 
less upon the implement. With either, the work is necessarily less 
perfectly done than with the spade, and the great desideratum of 
the day is to contrive a machine that shall have the efficiency of the 
spade and the capability of the plough. Many attempts have been 
made, but, until recently, without any thing like successful results. 
Amongst the most prominent of them is the digging machine 
