CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FAKM. 



of converting the hard clod into fine soil? Could 

 it, like the mole, cut a seed-led out of the solid f 

 If so, why entangle it with implements foreign to 

 its nature, unessential to its action, and behind it 

 in that order of inventive progress whose deep-cut 

 label is, ' Vestigia nulla EETROESTJM ? ' 



"But the Plow had left its rid ge-and-furrow im- 

 press not more in the fields than, alas ! on the mind 

 of the agriculturist of that day. It was long, and 

 naturally so, before he could bring an imagination 

 pre-occupied with the old-established system of 

 field-culture, to recognize its impending emancipa- 

 tion from the whole chain of subordinate necessities 

 exacted by the employment of horse-labor. The old 

 fable had become reversed : the quadruped was 

 riding the man ; to shake him off was now the diffi- 

 culty ! For a century after its invention, the Steam- 

 engine lay stillborn to the soil, and the virtue unap- 

 preciated of a new power which could antiquate 

 mere implements altogether, and convert the culti- 

 vating agent into a machine, in the strict sense of 

 the word ; a machine whose locomotion across the 

 field was a mere collateral incident, not a means / 

 as the sheep, or ox, walks over the pasture to crop 

 it, but does not crop it ~by walking. 



"And yet it was somewhat strange, too, that 



