2 AGRICULTURE. 



safely say that foreigners are ready to admit, as yet, the 

 superiority of this branch of our insular manufacture. At 

 any rate, the great extent to which their best writers rely 

 on the facts and reasonings of ours, cannot be questioned. 

 Nor can it be denied that this rapid succession of dictiona- 

 ries, treatises, pamphlets, journals, and the large circulation 

 which many of them deservedly attain, are features of the 

 time and features somewhat remarkable when we call 

 to mind that, within the memory of living men, agriculture 

 had scarcely advanced since Virgil wrote the Georgics ; 

 that the volumes of Tull and Arthur Young were the only 

 agricultural publications which could be found in an 

 English farmer's library, even where such a phenomenon 

 existed ; and that in the department of cattle-breeding, in 

 which we have now distanced the rest of the world, the 

 Roman poet appears to have had much the same perception 

 of the cardinal virtues of a bull or cow, as most of the 

 practical British farmers of those generations which pre- 

 ceded Collins and Bakewell. 



Up to their time cattle and sheep were produced accord- 

 ing to the generosity of the land on which their lot hap- 

 pened to be cast. Perhaps we owe it to difficulties of 

 internal communication that very distinct races maintained, 

 in some districts of small extent as compared to the sur- 

 face of Great Britain, a separate existence. Over the rest 

 of the country some little attention was paid to the 

 qualifications of the ox as a beast of draught, but beyond 

 this the cow was merely a milk and calf producing animal. 



The bull was selected for his proximity, and his best 

 recommendation was that he had given sufficient evidence 

 of the talent which Mr. Shandy desiderated in Obadiah's 

 grave pet. " Their bull gendereth and faileth not." When 

 he had served the parish in this capacity for three or four 

 years, he was discarded, from a prevalent and probably 

 well-founded idea that uncanonical connexions were, on 

 more than one account, inexpedient. He was then 

 marched off to Stilton or Porchester Castle to feed French 



