12 4 A GRIC UL TURAL WRITERS. 



the City of London, \\ here he occupied a prominent position, as he was 

 on the committee of the Royal Society that was specially concerned in 

 agriculture. He died in the parish of St. Leonard's, Eastcheap, in 1705. 



JOSEPH BLAGRAVE. 



i6]o-i682. 



Bearing the title of '' The Epitome of the Art of Husbandry," there was 

 issued first of all in 1669 a bulky little volume under the initials of J. B. ; 

 then again came further editions see Bibliography. The author's modesty 

 in not giving his full name was, no doubt, due to the fact that more than 

 half the whole book is made up of the material of earlier writers, over 

 one hundred pages being copied from Fitzherbert, whose work was 

 printed nearly 150 years earlier. Indeed, he seems to have drawn largely 

 from all who came before him, but, from a want of practical knowledge, 

 he had not suflficient intelligence to delete the irrelevant matter from 

 that which was good. There are chapters on ploughing, sowing, 

 grafting, ordering of flowers, herbs, directions for the use of the angle, 

 ordering of bees, together with the gentleman's heroic exercise in the 

 perfection of horsemanship, all kinds of farm stock, their diseases and 

 remedies ; the best way to plant clover, grass, saffron, liquorice, hemp, 

 madder, and woad ; to plash or plethe a hedge ; to make forks and rakes, 

 and a true and brief way of planting orchards. In the last edition he 

 adds 136 pages of " new additions," including birds, fruit and vegetable 

 gardening, that portion devoted to singing birds occupying eighty-five 

 pages. The illustrations show the title page and frontispiece of this 

 little volume in two editions. Blagrave was born in the parish of St. 

 Giles, Reading:. 



JOHN SMITH. 



1607-1673 [about). 



In 1670 Capt.'John Smith hrst issued '' England's Improvement Revived, 

 digested into Six Books (in a Treatise of all manner of Husbandry and 

 Trade by Land and Sea, plainly discovering the several ways of Improv- 

 ing all sorts of Waste and Barren Grounds, Enriching all Earths with 

 the Natural Quality of all Lands, and the several Seeds and Plants which 

 most naturally thrive therein, together with the manner of Planting all 

 sorts of Timber Trees, to make Walks Groves. Gardens, the way of 



