96 SCIENCE WITH PRACTICE, 1812 TO 1845 



hitherto farmers had been baffled by insuperable difficulties. 

 Over-wetness, which arose from water issuing to the surface 

 in consequence of subterranean interruptions to its course, 

 had been admirably dealt with by a Warwickshire farmer 

 named James Elkington at the close of the eighteenth 

 century. His services in tapping springs were in great 

 request in the midland counties, where his crowbar was 

 compared to the rod of Moses. He received a Parliamentary 

 grant of a thousand pounds ; but his success so largely 

 depended on experience, that his secret was but imperfectly 

 reduced to rules by Johnstone.^ Oiily springy or spouty 

 land was drained, and only those spots which were con- 

 sidered dangerous to cattle. A trench was cut deep enough 

 to reach the bed along which the water filtered before it 

 encountered the obstacle that forced it to the surface, and 

 was then filled with stones to within 2^ feet of the surface. 

 But in draining the soil of its surface water the ordinary 

 method was to throw the land into ridges from two to four 

 feet high. As the headlands were often similarly dammed 

 up, the furrows became standing pools of water. The 

 height of these ridges was sometimes extraordinary. In 

 Gloucestershire, while Marshall stood in a furrow, a man 

 of middle height, crossing the field towards him, was lost 

 to sight in every furrow. But this practice served other 

 purposes besides drainage. On grass lands it provided a 

 variety of herbage. Many farmers believed that it increased 

 the surface. It was also employed on light chalky loams 

 where it was not required for warmth or dryness, because 

 in common fields continually fallowed, if the lands had 

 lain flat, the soil would have been run together like lime 



' An Account of the 'most imjjroved Mode of Draining Land according 

 to the System practised by Mr. James Elkington. By John Johnstone, 

 Land Surveyor, Edinburgh, 1797. 



