TULL, JETHRO. 



believing, as he did, that earth, and earth alone, 

 was the sole food of plants of all kinds, he 

 ridiculed the opinion of Dr. Woodward, that all 

 the constituents of plants were conveyed to 

 them through the agency of water. Woodward 

 thought, very justly, " that water is only the 

 agent that conveys the vegetable matter to the 

 bodies of plants, that introduces and distributes 

 it to their several parts for their nourishment." 

 This theory seemed absurd to Jethro Tull, who 

 believed that all plants fed upon the same kind 

 of food, and that that food was earth, and only 

 earth. It is true that Tull had a very indistinct 

 idea that something else was requisite for the 

 food of plants, and that "certain materials con- 

 tribute in some manner to the increase of 

 plants." And he then specifies five substances, 

 at the head of which it is not a little singular 

 that he places saltpetre or nitre. But how this 

 salt operated as a fertilizer was not at all more 

 clear to Tull than to any who have succeeded 

 him in the investigation. "Nitre," he says, 

 (p. 10), "is useful to divide and prepare the 

 food, and may be said to nourish vegetables, in 

 much the same manner as my knife nourishes 

 me, by cutting and dividing my meat; but when 

 nitre is applied to the root of a plant, it will 

 kill it as certainly as a knife misapplied will 

 kill a man. Nitre is, in respect of nourish- 

 ment, just as much the food of plants as white 

 arsenic is the food of rats." Tull, however, 

 had a high opinion of the powers of common 

 salt, when used as a steep for seed-corn, to pre- 

 vent the smut in wheat; and he gives (p. 60) 

 this account of the origin of the practice. 

 "Brining of wheat, to cure or prevent smutti- 

 ness, was accidentally discovered about 70 

 years since, in the following manner : A ship- 

 load of wheat was sunk near Bristol in autumn, 

 and aAerwards at the ebb-tide all taken up, 

 after it had been soaked in sea-water ; but it 

 being unfit for making of bread, a farmer 

 sowed some of it in a field, and when it was 

 found to grow very well, the whole cargo was 

 bought at a low price by many farmers, and all 

 of it sown in different places. At the following 

 harvest, all the wheat in that part of England 

 happened to be smutty, except the produce of 

 the brined seed, and that was all clean from 

 smuttiness." He then gives the farmer direc- 

 tions for drying the brined seed, by rolling it 

 in quicklime, just as is now commonly prac- 

 tised by the farmer. 



Water, Tull thought, was not a food for 

 plants, because it commonly contains earth, to 

 which he attributed the origin of the common 

 opinion that water is a. food of plants. And as 

 to air being their food, which it certainly is, 

 Tull considered this as a complete "phantasie," 

 quite an "airy hypothesis." In common with 

 many of the learned of his days, Tull here 

 strangely confused himself, by not attending to 

 observations and experiments with regard to 

 plants, and to these only. The merit, however, 

 of Tull, amid his occasional mistakes, was en- 

 hanced by his modesty; and it is impossible 

 for us, when we reflect upon the difficulties he 

 had to encounter in the prosecution of his re- 

 searches, and in the production of his book, to 

 be insensible to his appeal, where he tells us, 

 at the conclusion of his preface, "One cause 



TUMBRIL. 



that made the three parts of this book (that is 

 to say, the theory, or speculative part, the prac- 

 tical part, and the description of the tools), the 

 more defective was, that all three were too 

 many for me to make perfect at once, and two 

 would have been useless without the third: 

 therefore, it was better to give but a sketch of 

 all than to have made any two of them never 

 so full and perfect, leaving out the other." 



Such was the modesty, such were the merits 

 of this great father of the drill and the horse- 

 hoe husbandry, to whose memory something, I 

 hope, will one day be erected some memorial 

 to indicate the agriculturist's gratitude, worthy 

 of the English farmer. Tull lies buried with- 

 out even a stone to indicate that such a bene- 

 factor of agriculture reposes beneath it. His 

 grave is even doubtfully placed. If Tull died 

 at Shalborn, as Chalmers asserts, he was not 

 buried there. There is no trace of him in the 

 parish register ; the tradition of the old people 

 of the neighbourhood is, that he died and was 

 buried in Italy. His deeds, his triumphs, it is 

 true, were of the quiet, peaceable kind, with 

 which the world in general is little enamoured; 

 but their results, their value to the land of his 

 birth, were of no mean order. His drill, his 

 horse-hoe, have saved his country, in seed 

 alone, the food of millions ; and when used 

 as a distributer of manure, it has done, and it 

 will hereafter accomplish, still greater things. 

 It has brought into cultivation thousands of 

 acres of the barren craig, the wolds of Lincoln- 

 shire, of the deep sands of Norfolk; and its 

 powers are not yet nearly exhausted, for, as 

 fresh fertilizers are discovered, the drill evenly 

 and economically distributes them; and as im- 

 provements in its construction are continually 

 taking place, there is evidently much yet to be 

 achieved by its use. The same remarks apply, 

 in a great measure, to his hoe, and to his sys- 

 tem of attempted cultivation without manure ; 

 for, although the last was a complete failure, 

 yet even this bold attempt was not unattended 

 with benefit to agriculture ; for the farmer was 

 hence taught, that, although by deep ploughing 

 and complete pulverization of the soil the use 

 of manure could not be entirely avoided, yet 

 that by these means a much smaller quantity 

 was sufficient than under the old and indolent 

 mode of tilling the land. The efforts, too, of 

 Tull were productive of advantage in other and 

 in indirect ways; his researches, his suc- 

 cesses, his example, excited a spirit of inquiry, 

 which since his days has hardly ever entirely 

 slumbered. He was certainly the first who 

 dared to boldly quit the beaten track, which 

 had been used by the farmer for ages, and fol- 

 low a way of his own. And although he has 

 been well followed and imitated by succeeding 

 cultivators, who have availed themselves of 

 new discoveries and machinery of which Tull 

 had not the assistance, yet there have been none 

 who have since excelled, or perhaps equalled 

 him, in the boldness and originality of his con- 

 ceptions, or in the energy with which he real- 

 ized them. (Quart. Journ. of Jlgr. vol. xi. p. 342.) 



TUMBREL. A sort of dung-cart, convenient 

 for many purposes. 



TUMBRIL. A machine employed chiefly in 

 the county of Lincoln, for the purpose of giving 

 4 u 3 1061 



