TULL, JETHRO. 



Prosperous, in July, 1840, was still in very 

 good condition. Of the out-houses, Tail's gra- 

 nary and his stables are yet in existence, 

 though fast verging to destruction ; and at the 

 end of this granary, which Tull built, is an old 

 well in which, when cleared out some years 

 since, was found, deeply buried in the accu- 

 mulated mud of nearly a century, a three- 

 pronged hoe, which there is no doubt belonged 

 to Tull, and is now in the museum of the Royal 

 Agricultural Society of England. Into this well 

 it was most likely thrown by his men, who, 

 adopting the use of his new tools with the ut- 

 most reluctance, annoyed him in many ways. 

 Against these he declaims with much bitterness: 

 "'Tis," he says, "the most formidable objec- 

 tion against our agriculture, that the defection 

 of servants and labourers is such, that few 

 gentlemen can keep their lands in their own 

 hands, but, rather than make nothing of them, 

 they let them for a little to tenants who can 

 bear to be insulted, assaulted, kicked, cuffed, 

 and bridewelled, with more patience than gen- 

 tlemen are endowed with." This burst of feel- 

 ing would very clearly intimate the probable 

 truth of the case that Tull was energetic and 

 irritable that his servants pillaged and an- 

 noyed him, and that he did not submit to their 

 impositions without struggling against them in 

 a way which his legal education should have 

 taught him to avoid. 



Such was the spirit of enterprise, and such 

 was the genius of Tull, that no difficulties, how- 

 ever formidable, stopped him in his researches. 

 His experiments, carried on in his garden and 

 in his house, with regard to the food and the 

 habits of plants, some of which he gives in the 

 first pages of his work, betray the thirst for 

 knowledge, the industry, and tact, which he 

 possessed. 



The tradition of his neighbours is, that, when 

 confined to his room and to his couch by his 

 incurable maladies, he yet managed to carry 

 on his experiments on vegetation, by having 

 large boxes and garden-pots of earth placed in 

 his room, and before his windows, where he 

 owed his seeds, and watched their progress 

 under different modes of cultivation, with all 

 the zeal of a martyr, and the enthusiasm of an 

 inventor. He is still spoken of by the old 

 labourers of that district, as being a man whom 

 it was impossible to oppose, in any of his 

 plans, with eventual success. He was evi- 

 dently the wonder of his neighbours, who 

 would, perhaps, have regarded him as a ma- 

 gician, if the age of witchcraft had not then 

 been nearly, if not quite, over. It would seem, 

 from what Tull says (p. 50), that it was in 

 1701 that he constructed his first drill for plant- 

 ing sainfoin. And the occasion of his doing 

 so he thus describes in his preface: "It was 

 very difficult to find a man that could sow 

 clover tolerably ; they had a habit (from which 

 they could not be driven) to throw it once with 

 the hand to two large strides, and go twice on 

 each cast; thus, with 9 or 10 pounds of seed 

 to the acre, two-thirds of the ground was un- 

 planted, and on the rest it was so thick that it 

 did not prosper. To remedy this, I made a 

 hopper, to be drawn by a boy, that planted an 

 -acre sufficiently with 6 pounds of seed; but 

 133 



TULL, JETHRO. 



when I added to this hopper an exceedingly 

 light plough, that made 6 channels 8 inches 

 asunder, into which 2 pounds of seed to an 

 acre being drilled, the ground was as well 

 planted. This drill was easily drawn by a 

 man, and sometimes by a boy." 



Jethro Tull's great improvements in tillage 

 consisted in the use of his drill, and in the adop- 

 tion of such wide intervals between his rows 

 of turnips (several feet, 3 to 6), that the horse- 

 hoe could be easily and constantly employed. 

 He ridiculed, very justly, the delusions under 

 which the farmers then laboured with regard 

 to the unvaried advantages of thick sowing. 

 He told them that they "did not grudge to be- 

 stow three or four pounds in the buying and 

 carriage of dung for an acre, but that they 

 thought themselves undone if they afforded an 

 extraordinary eighteen-pennyworth of earth to 

 the wide intervals of an acre, not considering 

 that earth is not only the best, but also the 

 cheapest entertainment that can be given to 

 plants." And again, in another place (p. 32), 

 he told the thick-sowing, broadcast cultivators 

 of those days, what must have not a little as- 

 tonished them, " that every row of vegetables 

 to be horse-hoed ought to have an empty space 

 or interval of 30 inches on one side of it at 

 least, and of nearly 5 feet in all sorts of corn;" 

 and he was very justly suspicious that what he 

 was going to advance " would seem shocking 

 to them before they have made trials." 



Tull was the first English farmer who advo- 

 cated to its fullest extent the decided advan- 

 tages of constantly pulverizing and stirring the 

 soil, to illustrate which almost all his experi- 

 ments were directed. His explanations, how- 

 ever, of his own discoveries were not always 

 so good as the object he had in view, although 

 there is little to find fault with in his theory of 

 the advantages of tillage. "I have had," he 

 says (p. 24), "the experience of a multitude of 

 instances, which confirm it so far, that I am in 

 no doubt that any soil, be it rich or poor, can 

 ever be made too fine by tillage ; for one cubi- 

 cal foot of this minute powder may have more 

 internal superficies than a thousand cubical 

 feet of the same or any other earth tilled in the 

 common manner; and I believe no two arable 

 earths in the world do exceed one another in 

 their natural riches twenty times ; that is, one 

 cubical foot of the richest is not able to pro- 

 duce an equal quantity of vegetables, cceteris 

 paribus, to 20 cubical feet of the poorest ; there- 

 fore, it is not strange that the poorest, where, 

 by pulverizing, it has obtained 100 times the 

 internal superficies of the rich, untilled land, 

 should exceed it in fertility ; or, if a foot of the 

 poorest was made to have 20 times the super- 

 ficies of such rich land, the poorest might pro- 

 duce an equal quantity of vegetables with the 

 rich. Besides, there is another extraordinary 

 advantage when a soil has a large internal 

 superficies in a very little compass ; for then 

 the roots of the plants in it are better supplied 

 with nourishment, being nearer to them on all 

 sides within reach than it can be when the 

 soil is less fine, as in common tillage, and the 

 roots in the one must extend much farther than, 

 in the other to reach an equal quantity of nou- 

 rishment; they must range and fill perhaps 

 4 U 1057 



