

PREFACE. 



Though the title of this work is sufficiently comprehensive, it 

 may not be improper to state the grounds on which it lays claim 

 to being the most complete body of Agriculture hitherto submitted 

 to the public. 



The subject of Agriculture admits of two grand divisions ; the im- 

 provement and general management of landed property, which may be 

 termed Territorial Economy ; and the cultivation and treatment of its 

 more useful animal and vegetable productions, which is called Husbandry, 

 or Agriculture in a more limited sense of the term. Numerous as have 

 been the publications on rural matters during the last twenty years, 

 there are but two or three of them, whose titles might lead to a sup- 

 position that they embraced both of these departments. Of these, two 

 may be cited : the Complete Farmer, as the most extensive, and the 

 Code of Agriculture, as the most recent. The Complete Farmer, or 

 Dictionary of Husbandry, in two thick quarto volumes, with numerous 

 plates, was published in 1807; it is copious to an excess, containing 

 an immense mass of matter, new and old, good and bad. As a diction- 

 ary of Husbandry, it was the best of its kind at the time of its publica- 

 tion : but the rapid progress of Agriculture since its date, renders it at 

 the present time quite an obsolete work. The Code of Agriculture, in 

 one volume octavo, published in 1817, professes to be " a general view 

 of the principles of the art, and an account of its most approved prac- 

 tices." [Pref. p. xi.) By inspecting the contents of the work, however, 

 it will be found limited to the Husbandry Department ; and of that 

 to contain little more than a general outline. That it never was 

 intended as more than a book on Farming, its first chapter, " On the 

 Preliminary Points which a Farmer ought to consider, &c.," and an ob- 

 servation of its author in his preface, sufficiently shews : " in addition," 

 he states, " (to the Code) it would certainly be desirable to have a 

 separate work on the Minutiae of Farming," " which," he continues, 

 *' might be accomplished in another volume of a similar size." {Pref, 

 p. xi.) The Code of Agriculture, therefore, has no other pretensions 

 to being a complete view of the subject, than what the imagination may 

 confer from the quaintness of its title. By this title it has been alleged, 

 the author probably intended, " some allusion to the Code Napoleon, 

 some mysterious reference to a body of laws, and some modest preten- 



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