33^ History of the English Landed Interest. 



fifty years the latter turned a deaf ear.^ Beclier in the cen- 

 tury before had initiated a new departure in this science, for 

 he had relinquished the mad search after the philosopher's 

 stone to direct attention to that which about the period of 

 which we are writing became known, under Stahl's instru- 

 mentalit}^ as the Phlogiston theory. Though the idea of an 

 inflammable earth was all nonsense, as Lavoisier ultimately 

 proved, it set chemists thinking, and paved the way to the dis- 

 covery of oxygen by the eighteenth-century chemists. That 

 event proved the key to a treasure store of Nature's secrets, 

 and during the last century of the world's history men have 

 hardly ceased to wonder over one great chemical discovery 

 before another still more brilliant eclipsed in importance its 

 predecessor. But at the time of which we write, though Boyle 

 had long been feeling his way in a right direction, Lavoisier, 

 Priestly, Davy, Dalton, Gay Lussac, Berzelius, Dumas, and 

 all the other great pioneers of chemical science were as yet 

 unborn. AVe, who are in possession of Liebig's, Gilbert's, and 

 Lawe's discoveries, can only marvel at the close and assiduous 

 industry of those seventeenth-century Flemish husbandmen, 

 which alone could have produced that empirical knowledge of 

 plant-life whose accuracy modern science has failed to impugn. 

 Even Irish soil showed unmistakable proofs of Cromwell's 

 beneficial rule, and new buildings, roads and plantations 

 opened up the country and converted sterile lands into a state 

 of cultivation as advanced as that of Kent or Norfolk. ^ In 

 Scotland, however, the agriculture of this period was wretched. 

 Even of the rich soils of the South-E astern counties an eye- 

 witness in 16G0 has handed down an unflattering account.^ 

 The Scotch ploughmen were too lazy to take off their cloaks 



' "VVorledge, in liis SyHtema Agricultures, makes mucli of the then 

 current belief, th.at there was a universal mex-cui-j^, sulpliur and salt, to 

 the proper combination of which a soil owed its fertilitj'. Rogers points 

 out that his phj-sical science and chemistry had progressed very little 

 beyond the stage of occult causation, which Bacon denounced, and very 

 little into that of observation and analj'sis, which Bacon commended. 

 Prices and Agriculture, Introd. vol. v. 



^ Macaulaj^, Hist, of Eng., ch. i. 



' Select liemains of John Bay, London, 17C0. 



