192 AGRICULTURE. 



and following the burning with one or more ponies har- 

 nessed to a tool which cannot accurately be called either 

 plough, hoe, or spud, but which in his hand jumps about 

 with the agility of an opera-dancer, he scratches the wood- 

 ashes into the little deposits of soil which exist between 

 the protruding rocks and stumps, and with them some 

 seed-rye ; repeating this crop for two or three years, ac- 

 cording to the staple of his soil ; and then resigning his 

 exhausted victim in order to renew the operation on the 

 piece of forest which is next in succession. It would be 

 difficult to improve his agriculture. A somewhat analogous 

 occupation of various poor wastes was, within a century, 

 known in England. In many of the enclosed counties, 

 particularly in the Midland, Northern, and Western, whole 

 districts are described by the appellation of up and down 

 land. The agricultural principle was, to call on mysterious 

 nature to renew the exhausted soil. The system was frugal, 

 but slow. It might consist with pack-horses, perhaps with 

 stage- waggons, but it was scouted by post-coaches, and ex- 

 ploded by railroads. It was not suited to a country fully 

 occupied, and which had an increasing population. The 

 gross produce was necessarily small, and could support 

 neither high rents nor heavy payments. Every new agri- 

 cultural device proposed to get rid of it. 



We can remember when it was treason to agricultural 

 science to doubt that the four-course shift, with turnips 

 consumed by sheep where they grew, was self-sustaining. 

 Sufficient virtue was supposed to exist in the feet of the 

 sheep to set at nought a principle which had been sanc- 

 tioned by experience in every age and every clime. The 

 answer to the statement that land stimulated by culture 

 could not, permanently, export its produce without ex- 

 haustion was rotation of crops and the four-course shift. 

 Sane men assured the agricultural world, that a farm 

 divided into four equal parallelograms, to be occupied suc- 

 cessively by turnips, barley, clover, and wheat, would go 

 on for ever on its own resources with increasing fertility. 



