CHAPTER XIIL 



THE SCIENTIFIC AGRICULTURE OF THE PERIOD. 



Any intelligent husbandman must realise the fact that the 

 chemist and engineer would look to him first to direct their 

 research into those channels best calculated to assist him ; and 

 that they would obtain this necessary information far better by 

 discovering the blunders of his practice than by being told of 

 its successes. Unfortunately he himself hardly knew in what 

 direction his system was defective, and this naturally retarded 

 their suggestion of the proper remedies. 



But the first approaches made by science to agriculture 

 occurred through the medium of the physiologist. Amongst 

 Englishmen the abstract principles of fertility had engaged the 

 passing observation of Lord Bacon, and the more prolonged 

 attention of Woodward and Evelyn.^ The great diarist wrote 

 a treatise on the nature of earth for the Royal Society'", in 

 which, as a proof of the complexity of his subject (we might 

 add, of his own ignorance), he quotes from the De Arte 

 Comhinatoria that there were supposed to be one hundred and 

 seventy-nine million one thousand and sixty varieties of 

 earths, of which some eight or nine only were known! Laurem- 

 bergius had informed the world that " where the Mould lies so 

 close, as it does not replenish the Foss, out of which it has been 

 dug, any corn sown in that country soon degenerates into Rye ; 

 and what is still more remarkable, that the rye sown in 

 Thuringia (where the Earth is less compacted) reverts after 

 three crops, to bo wheat again." On a par with such non- 

 sense was Lord Bacon's belief that where the extremity of the 



' Essaij toicards a i\alAiral Ilisforij of the Karl It. Dr. Woodward, 1G*J5. 

 Terra Evelyn. 



280 



