INTR OD UCTOR Y. 23 



chiefly indebted to Worlidge, a farmer living at Petersfield in 

 Hampshire, whose work I shall comment on : on local 

 industries, some of which, as the manufacture of salt from 

 brine springs, was being rediscovered ; on manufactures, such 

 as those of iron, woollen goods, and the like ; but particularly 

 on physical science as it was understood in those days. He 

 was intimate for example with Halley the astronomer, and 

 gives an account in one of his papers of an ingenious method 

 by which this eminent person calculated the area of England 

 in acres l , the resultant error, considering the exceedingly 

 primitive character of the process, not being very surprising. 

 But his physical science and chemistry have progressed very 

 little beyond the stage of occult causation which Bacon de- 

 nounced, and very little into that of observation and analysis 

 which Bacon commended. 



The people of England, as I have said above, passed through 

 a period of severe discipline during the time that they were 

 accommodating themselves to the experience of altered prices. 

 I have good reason to believe that it was not till the accession 

 of James that rents began to move upwards, except in so far 

 as owners were able to take advantage of changes of occu- 

 pancy, at that time, I believe, events of rare occurrence. The 

 four corporations for which the Act of 1576 made provision, 

 were, except in the case of the Oxford Colleges, not very 

 eager to exchange the rents in kind which they had imposed 

 upon their tenants for rents in money interpreted in two kinds 

 of arable produce which the statute prescribed. 



In these corporations, particularly in the two great schools, 

 the system of rents in kind was convenient, because the 



1 1 1 alley took the largest map of England and Wales which he could get. that of 

 Adams, measured it from sea to sea at various points, and so calculated the gross 

 area of the surface. To discover the superficies of the several counties, he carefully 

 cut out of the map the several divisions, dried the pieces of paper, and weighed them 

 exactly. He made allowance then for rivers, and distributed the acreage according 

 to the quantity in each of the parts. The reader may find the calculation in the 

 twenty fifth number of the Collections for Husbandry and Trade. Halley makes 

 the gross area 39,938,500 acres, while in reality it is 37,324,883. 



