TULL, JETHRO. 



"body of farmers and husbandmen pronounced 

 the man as a conjuror, who, by sowing a third 

 part of his land, would make it produce a 

 quantity equal to that of sowing the whole." 



The farm of Jethro Tull will ever be an ob- 

 ject of interest to the lover of agriculture. Ar- 

 thur Young made a pilgrimage to Prosperous 

 (Jlnnals of dgr. vol. xxiii. p. 173), and William 

 Cobbett did the same. More persons would 

 visit it if they knew where it was to be found. 

 To such it will be interesting to know that the 

 rural parish of Shalborn is situated under the 

 Coomb Hills, about 4 miles south of Hunger- 

 ford ; that the roads are tolerable, and the pre- 

 sent holder of the farm obliging, and not insen- 

 sible of Tail's great merits. If Tull was de- 

 ceived in his belief of the powers of the 

 plough to render the soil fertile without the as- 

 sistance of manure, he was yet fully justified 

 in almost every thing that he predicted, with 

 regard to the advantages of thoroughly pdlver- 

 jzing and increasing the depth of the soil. 



" The difference betwixt the operation of the 

 spade and that of the common plough," he ob- 

 serves, " is only this, that the former commonly 

 divides the soil into smaller pieces, and goes 

 deeper ;" and he adds, " how easy and natural 

 it is to contrive a plough that may equal the 

 spade, if not exceed it, by going deeper, and 

 cutting the soil into smaller pieces than the 

 spade commonly does." The explanation, too, 

 which Jethro Tull gave to the advantages or 

 theory of deep ploughing was excellent, consi- 

 dering the chemical knowledge of his days; 

 for the modern cultivator must remember, that, 

 in his time, the composition of the atmosphere 

 was almost entirely unknown. Tull could not 

 have known any thing of the three gases, 

 nitrogen, oxygen, and carbonic acid, of which 

 it is now fpund to be constituted ; and of the 

 existence of its insensible aqueous vapour he 

 was equally unacquainted; he did not know 

 how important these are to the roots of plants, 

 and how the access of them all is naturally 

 promoted by pulverizing the land on which they 

 vegetate. But though Tull did not know these 

 things, yet it is certain that he had carefully 

 observed many facts which proved that vapour 

 was absorbed by the soil, and that this absorp- 

 tion was promoted by pulverization. "To de- 

 monstrate," he says (pp. 27, 28), " that dews 

 moisten the land when fine, dig a hole in the 

 hard, dry ground, in the driest weather, as deep 

 as the plough ought to reach ; beat the earth 

 very fine, and fill the hole therewith ; and after 

 a few nights' dews, you will this fine earth be- 

 come moist at the bottom, and the hard ground 

 all round will become dry. Till a field in 

 lands: make one land very fine by frequent 

 deep ploughing, and let another be rough by 

 insufficient tillage alternately ; then plough the 

 whole field crosswise in the driest weather, 

 which has continued long, and you will per- 

 ceive, by the colour of the earth, that every 

 fine land will be turned up moist, but every 

 rough land will be dry as powder from top to 

 bottom. In the driest weather, good hoeing 

 procures moisture to roots ; though the igno- 

 rant and incurious fancy it lets in the drought, 

 and therefore are afraid to hoe their plants at 

 such times." 

 1060 



TULL, JETHRO. 



These enlightened observations of Tull have 

 been verified and illustrated by the progress of 

 agricultural discovery, by the improved modes 

 of practice adopted by modern farmers, and by 

 the march of chemical philosophy. Evelyn 

 had observed the advantages of continually 

 keeping the ground of fruit orchards hoed or 

 dug. Sir Henry Steuart attests, with Sir Wal- 

 ter Scott, Withers, and a hundred others, the 

 same fact, as applicable to timber plantations. 

 The farmers of even the most sandy soils of 

 Norfolk, on the very same principle, keep the 

 ground between their rows of turnips con- 

 stantly stirred, just as Tull proposed and prac- 

 tised a century since. And when, long after 

 Tull was in his grave, Dr. Priestley discovered 

 the oxygen gas of the atmosphere, it was soon 

 found that its presence was essential to the 

 growth of plants ; that it was highly grateful 

 to the roots of plants, either when applied to 

 them in its simple state, or when combined 

 with the aqueous matters of the atmosphere ; 

 and that this application was very sensibly 

 indeed promoted, in either form, by increasing 

 the finely divided state of the soil ; and, fur- 

 ther, that without this division of its particles, 

 the earth was totally incapable of absorbing 

 either the necessary gases or the watery va- 

 pour. 



The subsoil-plough of Mr. Smith of Dean- 

 stpn, and the subturf-plough of Sir Edward 

 Stracey, which have both proved so successful 

 in our days, only illustrate the truth of Tuli's 

 principles and Tuli's sagacious observations. 

 Tull was an advocate for deep ploughing, and 

 for internal pulverizations: he did not, it is 

 true, see the necessary limits, on ordinary soils, 

 and with common ploughs, to the realization 

 of this theory : he forgot that the inert nature 

 of many substrata would render it impossible 

 to bring them at once to the surface ; but 

 though he omitted to take this into his calcula- 

 tion, yet still he argued correctly enough, when 

 he so strenuously urged his brother farmers to 

 increase the depth of their soils by every prac- 

 ticable means, to let in the air to the roots of 

 their crops, and to give every facility possible 

 to the growth of the roots of the plants ; for, by 

 so doing, he very plainly told them they derived 

 benefits which exclusively belong to the vege- 

 table world. " There is yet," he said (p. 28), 

 "one more benefit hoeing gives to plants, 

 which by no art can possibly be given to ani- 

 mals ; for all that can be done in feeding an 

 animal is, to give it sufficient food at the time 

 it has occasion for it; if you give an animal 

 any more, it is to no manner of purpose, unless 

 you could give it more mouths, which is im- 

 possible ; but, in hoeing a plant, the additional 

 nourishment thereby given enables it to send 

 out innumerable additional fibres and roots ; so 

 that hoeing, by the new pasture it raises, fur- 

 nishes both food and mouths to plants." 



To every agricultural operation, in fact, of a 

 mechanical nature, Tuli's genius was admira- 

 bly adapted; his ploughs, his hoes, his drills, 

 were all of a description far superior to those 

 of the rest of the farmers of those days. It was 

 only where he attempted to reason upon the 

 habits and food of plants, involving chemical 

 truths, that Tull made great blunders. Thus, 



