Freedom and Progress 77 



1838 the Royal Agricultural Society of England came into 

 existence, and numerous local clubs and associations sprang up 

 over the country, all of them designed to stimulate and promote 

 agriculture. 



In 1840 Liebig, a German chemist, published a book on 

 Chemistry in its Application to Agriculture and Physiology, and 

 both he and his book were received with appreciation and 

 criticism by scientific men and by agriculturists in England. 

 His contribution to knowledge on the subject made more stir 

 than anything of the kind had previously done. What he did was 

 to make clear some of the processes by which plants are nourished, 

 on what elements in the air and in the soil they feed. His work 

 was sufficient to show how ' artificial ' manures could be made to 

 supply the needs of crops, and also to explain why the practice 

 of farmers in using certain manures was successful. In 1843 

 Sir J. B. Lawes founded the Rothamsted Experimental Station 

 to develop and test such ideas as Liebig's. This kind of progress 

 had an attraction for men. There was a romantic exhilaration 

 in the hope that chemistry and botany might any day do some- 

 thing great for agriculture. 



While farmers had to depend on experts for such scientific 

 work, they frequently helped themselves in mechanics and 

 engineering. The threshing machine which we use to-day was 

 invented by farmers, one man adding something to the work of 

 another. In 1784 Andrew Meikle, a farmer in East Lothian, 

 erected the first machine which did all the essential things that 

 modern machines do. A farmer of Hawick, named Rogers, 

 seems to have made the first winnowing machine about 1733. 

 We have seen that farmers themselves improved the methods of 

 draining. The use of threshing machines, turnip-slicers, and 

 chaff-cutters became much more general about 1850. They were 

 driven by horses, or by water where this was available. On many 

 estates, however, in Scotland and England boilers and engines of 



