INVENTION OF THE CORN-DRILL 171 



which covered the seed. The machine answered its purpose, and 

 he afterwards introduced several improvements of his original plan. 

 The originality of his invention cannot justly be disputed, though 

 his enemies, and he had many, asserted that he brought the machine 

 from abroad or had been preceded by Plat, Plattes or Worlidge. 

 All four inventors saw the advantage of sowing not broadcast but 

 in rows. Both Plat and Plattes were setters, rather than drillers, 

 of corn, and they took for their model the dibbing of beans or peas. 

 Plat seems to have invented a board, to which were fixed iron 

 dibbers. Something of this sort is depicted on the title-page of 

 Edward Maxey's New Instruction * (1601). Gabriel Plattes designed 

 a machine to punch holes in the land as it went along. But, as is 

 pointed out in Hartlib's Legacie, the author of which suggested 

 hoeing the furrows by hand, the machine would have been prac- 

 tically useless in wet and heavy land. Neither Plat nor Plattes 

 contemplated a mechanical sowing ; both intended the seed to be 

 deposited by hand. In this respect Worlidge's drill was an advance 

 on his predecessors. He placed coulters in front of the seed-boxes, 

 from which the seed was deposited through barrels into furrows. 

 But he never made or tried his implement. When Professor Brad- 

 ley in 1727 constructed a machine from Worlidge's drawing, he 

 found that it would not work. To Tull, therefore, belongs the 

 credit of the first drill which served any practical purpose. 



Tull's many mechanical inventions were less valuable than the 

 reasons which he gave for their employment. His implements 

 were speedily superseded ; his principles of agriculture remain. 

 During his foreign travels he was impressed with the cultivation 

 of vineyards in the south of France, where frequent ploughings 

 between parallel rows of vines not only cleaned the land, but 

 worked and stirred the food-beds of the plants until the vintage 

 approached maturity. Tull determined to extend the principles 

 of vine-culture to the crops of the English farm. He argued that 

 tillage was equally necessary before and after sowing. When crops 

 were sown, nature at once began to undo the effect of previous 

 ploughings and sowings. The earth united, coalesced, consolidated, 

 and so shut out the air and water from the roots, and decreased 

 the food supply at the moment when the growing plants most 

 needed increased nourishment. To some extent the use of farm- 



1 A New Instruction of Plowing and Setting of Corne, handled in manner 

 of a Dialogue betweene a Ploughman and a Schotter. 



