362 HIGH FARMING, 1837-1874 



progress of agriculture are the extension of drainage, the discovery 

 of artificial manures, the increased purchase of feeding stuffs for 

 cattle, the improvement of implements, the readier acceptance of new 

 ideas and inventions. Sucb an advance was impossible in the days 

 of pack-waggons. By the railways all that farmers had to sell or 

 wanted to buy, corn and cattle, coal, implements, machinery, 

 manures, oil-cake, letters and newspapers, as well as the men them- 

 selves, were conveyed to and fro more expeditiously and more 

 cheaply. 



Drainage was the crying need of the day both for pasture and 

 arable land. If the land was heavy and undrained pasture, the 

 moisture-loving plants overpowered the more nutritive herbage ; 

 the over-wetness became in rainy seasons a danger to the stock ; 

 the early and late growth of grass was checked ; the effect of autumn 

 and spring frosts was more severely felt. If stiff, retentive, un- 

 drained land was under the plough, it was cultivated at greater cost, 

 on fewer days in the year, during a season shorter at both ends, 

 than lighter soils ; unless the seasons were favourable, it produced 

 late and scanty harvests of corn and beans, was often unsafe for 

 stock, could bear the introduction neither of roots nor of green- 

 cropping, repeatedly needed bare fallows, wasted much of the 

 benefit of manures and feeding stuff. For many years clay-farmers 

 had been seeking for some expedient which would remedy the over- 

 wetness of their land, and enable them to share in the profits that 

 new resources had placed within reach of their neighbours on freer 

 and more porous soils. It was upon them that the blow of agri- 

 cultural depression from 1813 to 1836 had fallen with the greatest 

 severity. Clay farms had fallen into inferior hands, partly because 

 men of capital preferred mixed or grazing farms. Weaker tenants 

 were thus driven on to the heavier land, on which they could not 

 afford the outlay needed to make their holdings profitable. Yet 

 their strong land, if seasons proved favourable, was still capable 

 of yielding the heaviest crops. Some process was needed which 

 would so change the texture of the soil as to render it more friable, 

 easier to work, more penetrable to the rain, more accessible to air 

 and manure, and therefore warmer and kindlier for the growth of 

 plant life. 



The usual expedient for carrying off the water from heavy soils 

 was the open-field practice of throwing the land into high ridges, 

 whence the rain flowed into intervening furrows, which acted as 



