ARTHUR YOUXG AND THE DIFFUSION OF KNOWLEDGE 61 



moter or more backward parts of England roads were 

 impassable except for well-mounted horsemen, or wagons 

 drawn by twelve horses. In narrow country lanes bells on 

 the team were not an ornament, but a necessary warning. 

 Roads were engineered on the principle that ' one good 

 turn deserves another.' Farmers of one district knew the 

 practices of the next as little as those of Kamtschatka. 

 Outside their limited range were only 



Anthropophagi, and men whose heads 

 Do grow beneath their shoulders. 



This extreme isolation was a formidable obstacle. Yet the 

 days when Gloucester seemed in ' the Orcades,' and York 

 was a Pindaric flight from London, had advantages. In 

 1800 it took fifty-four hours for ' a* philosopher, six shirts, 

 his genius, and his hat upon it,' to reach London from 

 Dublin. 



Traditional practices were agricultural heirlooms, which 

 farmers guarded with jealous care : ocular proof of the 

 superiority of new systems failed to wean them from the 

 routine of their ancestors. Hartlib complained that in 

 Kent he had seen ' four, six, yea, twelve horses and oxen 

 to one plough ; ' nor were the teams diminished a century 

 later. By immemorial custom in Gloucestershire, two men 

 and a boy, with a team of six horses, were employed for 

 ploughing. Mr. Coke sent a Norfolk ploughman into the 

 county, who, with a pair of horses and a Norfolk plough, 

 did the same amount of work in the same time. But 

 though the annual expenses were thus diminished by 120Z. 

 it was twenty years before neighbours profited by the 

 lesson. In 1780 a Norfolk farmer settled in Devonshire, 

 where he cultivated turnips on the newest methods. His 

 crops were larger and finer than those of other farmers ; 



