60 AGRICULTURE IN THE 



quite certain that through the seventeenth century tame 

 pigeons were generally very cheap. 



Among the correspondence appended to Hartlib's f Legacy ' 

 are several letters from English agriculturists detailing the 

 success with which they had carried out the cultivation of 

 clover, and the profit which they had procured from their 

 venture. One of these letters concludes, ' Though you were not 

 the parent of this husbandry, yet you were the hand which did 

 obstetricate and give it birth, which else had been strangled in 

 a private hand, and the public never known this benefit, for 

 which it is your debtor, and as a limb thereof, your friend and 

 servant, R. H.' Hartlib's correspondent confesses to a profit 

 in hay and seed of 30 an acre for two acres, besides the 

 aftermath. Similar testimony is given by Mr. Cruttenden, a 

 landowner near Tunbridge. Hartlib survived the Restoration 

 about two years, for the last notice of him, according to Mr. 

 Dircks, who published a life of him in 1865, is in April, 1662. 



Among the pamphlets of the time (1670) is an anonymous 

 tract giving an account of the manner in which barren and 

 heathy land in Brabant and Flanders is turned into valuable 

 arable in less than seven years, the writer stating that he has 

 seen the process himself. It must have been this system 

 which Arthur Young witnessed, when he spoke of f the magic 

 of property turning sand into gold.' A farmer will take five 

 hundred acres of this land, and first break it up with a strong 

 team, then plough it across, harrow it, and burn the heath, the 

 ashes being scattered over the ground. He then lays twenty 

 loads of dung to the acre, and ploughs it in. Some he says 

 then cultivate on a four-course system, first of flax, then of 

 turnips, then of oats with clover, the clover being the crop of 

 the fourth year. Some again have a course of rye, oats, turnips, 

 and oats with clover. The manure is obtained by housing 

 sheep at night, and laying three or four inches of sand on the 

 fold till the sand is saturated, when a fresh layer is laid. In 

 this way three or four hundred sheep will produce a thousand 

 loads of dung a year. The terms on which such an estate is 



