SKETCH OF MODERN AGRICULTURE 



57 



made it an attractive and honorable career for gentlemen and 

 scholars. Their work, and more particularly their example, in- 

 spired that long line of gentlemen farmers, men of means 

 and education who have devoted themselves to agriculture with 

 all the zeal and enthusiasm of the artist for his art or a pro- 

 fessional man for his profession, and who have done so much 

 to keep English agriculture in advance of the rest of the world 

 from that day to this. 



Arthur Young. The writings of Arthur Young and others 

 contributed to the same end. Arthur Young, the best known 

 of all English writers on agriculture, was a farmer of Suffolk, 

 who began writing in this field in 1767 and continued for 

 the next thirty-eight years, many of his writings being trans- 

 lated into French, German, and other languages. He traveled 

 up and down England and other countries on horseback for 

 months at a time, making careful observations, which he pub- 

 lished in his series of "Tours." From 1773 to 1776 he made 

 several tours in Ireland, and during the years 1787 to 1790 he 

 made three extensive tours in France. His " Travels in France," 

 published in 1792, is his best-known work, mainly because he 

 described the condition of the people on the eve of the great 

 revolution, and his account is still regarded as the best descrip- 

 tion of the actual state of the country and the people at the 

 time of that great crisis. He is the author of the well-known 

 phrase, " The magic of property turns sand into gold." Under- 

 drainage of wet land began to be practiced in 1764 by Joseph 

 Elkington in Warwickshire. 



The breeding of live stock ; English breeds of cattle. While 

 these advances were being made in general agriculture and the 

 cultivation of field crops, equally striking results were being 

 achieved in animal breeding. Accounts differ as to the char- 

 acter and quality of English live stock at the beginning of this 

 period. The probabilities are that there was little uniformity, 



