TULL, JETHRO. 



presently see, Tull became a farmer not from 

 inclination, but from the effects of a sickly con- 

 stitution and diseased frame. 



The life of Jethro Tull will, indeed, well re- 

 pay the careful and t>ften-repeated study of the 

 English farmer in more ways than one; will 

 afford not only instruction, but encouragement 

 to him who has to contend against the poorest 

 soils, the most adverse of circumstances ; for, 

 if such a cultivator holds a poor, thin, hungry 

 soil, so did Jethro Tull ; if he farms in a re- 

 mote and desolate district ; if he has ignorant 

 and obstinate labourers ; if he is visited by 

 sickness ; if he is almost driven from his pro- 

 fession by even incurable diseases, so, let him 

 be assured, was that great farmer whose la- 

 bours are the subject of this memoir. The 

 dauntless intrepidity and perseverance, too, of 

 Tull, should always be remembered to his 

 honour. Knowing, as he did, the correctness 

 of the principles for which he so nobly contend- 

 ed, he never relaxed in his endeavours to in- 

 duce their general adoption ; and if it was only 

 after the lapse of many years, when Tull had 

 long been in his grave, that those principles 

 and those mechanical inventions for which he 

 so energetically contended were commonly 

 adopted, the fault was not Tail's, but must be 

 attributed to the ignorance and the apathy of 

 the age in which he made his important, his 

 ill-requited discoveries. 



The debt of gratitude which all modern far- 

 mers owe to Tull is, indeed, a large one ; 

 he was the first who boldly and zealously 

 contended for the adoption of improved ma- 

 chinery in all agricultural operations ; the 

 ploughs which he depicts in the engravings 

 which accompany his Horse-hoe Husbandry, 

 have not been very materially improved in the 

 last century. He invented several varieties 

 of hand and horse-hoes. He was very nearly, 

 if not quite, the first who produced a practically 

 useful drill. He shared the fate of all those 

 who, as discoverers, have the temerity to dis- 

 turb old systems. He was regarded by the 

 bulk of his contemporaries as an idle, restless 

 innovator. He was ridiculed, thwarted, and 

 opposed in every way, not, as might have been 

 reasonably expected, by the most ignorant, but 

 by those who either did know, or ought to have 

 known, better things. His neighbours regarded 

 him as almost a lunatic ; and the tradition of 

 the neighbourhood of Shalborn still is, that he 

 was even wicked enough to attempt to banish 

 the flail from his farm, and that he had a ma- 

 chine in his barn at Prosperous, which worked 

 a set of sticks so readily as to thrash out his 

 corn without the assistance of the labourer. 

 This, there is little doubt, was an attempt to con- 

 struct a thrashing-machine ; and that it was, in 

 those quiet days for agriculture, regarded as a 

 wonder, is proved by the existence of the tra- 

 dition. When thus located in a remote rural 

 parish, on the borders of the counties of Berks, 

 Hants, and Wilts, Tull wrote his Husbandry, 

 a book which is not nearly so well known as 

 it ought to be ; for, though the progress of 

 science has rendered a considerable portion of 

 Tail's writings obsolete, yet much, very much, 

 remains unaltered by the progress of discovery, 

 1056 



TULL, JETHRO. 



to amply repay the farmer for a careful and 

 often repeated perusal. 



Tull wrote with all the modesty and diffi- 

 dence of genius : he tells us, in the preface to 

 his Husbandry, that he knew that he had un- 

 dertaken a task of which he was incapable, 

 and that it was produced during a long con- 

 finement within the limits of a lonely farm, in 

 a country where he was a stranger. And 

 when we remember that he was, through life, 

 an. invalid, obliged to abandon his sedentary 

 profession of the law, and seek for health by 

 foreign travel and by country pursuits, when 

 we think of these things, we cannot but still 

 more admire the energy of mind he betrayed, x 

 and the difficulties he overcame. He feelingly 

 alludes to some of these, when he says, with 

 regard to his great work "'Tis no wonder 

 that the style is low as the author, or as the 

 dust that is here treated of, since the whole was 

 written in pains of the stone, and other dis- 

 eases as incurable and almost as cruel ; but 

 fine language will not fill a farmer's barn." 

 Every thing connected with the history of this 

 great benefactor of agriculture must 'be inte- 

 resting to the cultivators of this and all other 

 countries. I regret that, with some industry, I 

 have not been able to obtain for the farmer 

 more information with regard to him. He was 

 born in Oxfordshire, on his paternal estate. 

 He was educated for the legal profession, be- 

 came a member of Staple Inn, and was called 

 to the bar on the llth December, 1693, by the 

 benchers of Gray's Inn, and not at the Temple, 

 as is commonly asserted in the biographical 

 dictionaries. He was afflicted soon after his 

 call to the bar with a pulmonary disorder, and, 

 in consequence, abandoned his Oxfordshire 

 farm, and for some time travelled on the Con- 

 tinent. He was for a considerable period at 

 Montpelier, in the south of France. Returning 

 to England, he took into his own hands the 

 farm called Prosperous, at Shalborn, in Berk- 

 shire, where, again resuming those agricultural 

 efforts which he had commenced in Berkshire, 

 he wrote his Horse-hoe Husbandry. 



During his tour on the Continent, Tull care- 

 fully compared the agriculture of France and 

 Italy with that of his own country, and omitted 

 no occasion to observe and note every thing 

 which supported his own views and discove- 

 ries. He particularly, on more than one occa- 

 sion, in his work, alludes to the similarity of 

 the practice followed by the vine-dressers of 

 the south of Europe, in constantly hoeing or 

 otherwise stirring their ground, and his own 

 horse-hoe husbandry. Finding that they did 

 not approve of dunging their vineyards, Tull 

 readily adduced the fact in favour of his own 

 favourite theory, that manuring a soil is an un- 

 necessary operation. 



After Tail's decease, his lands in Berkshire 

 found their way into Chancery, and were sold, 

 by order of the court, in 1784, to Mr. Blandy, 

 the father of the present owner. It consists of 

 about 70 acres of freehold land, but Tull held 

 about 130 acres in addition, by a different te- 

 nure. The house in which he dwelt has been 

 modernized, but the old-fashioned brew-house 

 yet remains as Tull had it ; and when I visited 



