COMBINATION AND COMMINUTION. 55 



With every turn of the horses, better and better it 

 looked and worked. An increasing elasticity of 

 movement seemed to pervade men, horses, harrows, 

 soil, and even the very atmosphere of the field. 

 Before the work was half done, THEORY and the 

 Chronicle were at a premium.* 



* The cultivator who has " brought to, or subdued a pieco 

 of stubborn and hitherto worthless soil into productive 

 condition, will sympathize most heartily with our author 

 in his admirably told success in achieving his object. There 

 is not, under the sun, an honester and more useful victory 

 won, than that over the unyielding soil, in which a worthless 

 swamp is converted into a smiling and productive field. 

 It is not only the blotting out of a deformity, but the 

 creation of a spot of beauty on God's footstool which will 

 last forever. There is not a word of exaggeration in the 

 description of our author of his reduction of so many for- 

 bidding elements into the best possible soil for perfect culti- 

 vation, as we know by similar experience. Such labors are 

 not only a direct source of profit to the proprietor himself, 

 but the result remains forever a source of profit to his suc- 

 cessors ; and having " caused two blades of grass to grow 

 where but one grew before," ho becomes a public benefactor. 

 Probably full one-fourth of the teeming fields of England 

 and Scotland have undergone the identical process described 

 in this chapter. The allusion to the " Chronicle " in the last 

 line refers to the "Gardener's Chronicle and Agricultural 

 Gazette," noticed in our introduction. ED. 



