i86 AGRICULTURAL WRFTERS. 



JETHRO TULL. 



1674-1740. 



I.\ any list of distinguished English farmers this writer must always hold 

 an important position, for, utterly regardless of all selfish considerations, 

 he not only made great and successful efforts for the promotion of 

 agriculture, but he conducted those valuable researches particularly 

 known in the book of which I reproduce the title-page of two editions, 

 a work that will hand him down to all ages as a patriot, who, undaunted 

 by the natural difficulties of the attempt, attained great and important 

 advances in cultivating and increasing the fertility of the land, and in 

 enlarging the resources of the follower of a profession to which he was 

 not originally bred ; yet, knowing as he did the correctness of the 

 principles for Avhich he so nobly contended, he never relaxed his 

 endeavours to induce their general adoption, and, as with many before 

 him, it was only after the lapse of many vears, when Tull had long been 

 in his grave, that those principles and the mechanical inventions which 

 he created were commonly adopted. 



He was the unwearied advocate of drill sowing and frequent hoeing — - 

 the greatest improvements which have been introduced into the modern 

 practice of tillage. The saving of seed effected by this practice is no 

 small consideration, for let it be remembered that millions of acres are 

 annually sown to grow food for man and his assistant animals, and that 

 by drilling more than one-third of the requisite seed is saved. But this 

 is of trivial importance when compared with the facility that drilling 

 affords for the destruction of weeds and loosening the soil by the hoe. 

 Every weed is really a robber depriving cultivated plants of a portion of 

 their nourishment, and hindering them from light and air. The benefit 

 derivable from the practice of loosening the soil is too well known to need 

 repetition. Before Tull's time thick sowing broadcast and the scanty 

 employment of the hoe Avere the custom of the day, and when Tull 

 adopted and published a work recommending a practice totally the 

 reverse, though many came to see his " new system of husbandry," yet 

 they for the most part derided it, and his very labourers thwarted him in 

 " his new-fangled ways." Yet he wrestled firmly and undauntedly 

 against all difficulties. Tull was educated at Oxford, and admitted 

 a student of Gray's Inn, being ultimatelv called to the Bar, but 

 acute disease drove him from a sedentarv life, vet not into idleness. 

 During his travels in search of health he directed his attention to the 

 agriculture of the countries through which he passed, and, finding that 

 in France they never manured their vineyards, he rashly concluded that 

 all plants might be similarly treated. Like many other inventors, he 



