56 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



however, already been made. "The wool of Warwickshire, North- 

 amptonshire, Lincolnshire, and Rutland, with some parts of Hunting- 

 don, Bedford, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, and Norfolk, has 

 been accounted the longest and finest combing wool. But of late 

 years [this was written in 1739] there have been improvements made 

 in the breed of sheep by changing of rams and sowing of turnips and 

 grass seeds, and now there is some large fine combing wool to* be found 

 in most counties in England, which is fine, long, and soft, fit to make 

 all sorts of fine stuff and hose of." Still improvements in feeding 

 sheep were by no means universally adopted for half a century later. 

 Agricultural implements, too, were very primitive, wooden ploughs 

 being commonly in use, while the small, narrow-wheeled waggon of 

 the North held 40 or 50 bushels with difficulty. 



An agrarian revolution plays as large part in the great industrial 

 change of the end of the eighteenth century as does the revolution in 

 manufacturing industries, to which attention is more usually directed. 

 .... Severely as these changes bore upon the rural population, they 

 wrought, without doubt, direct improvement from an agricultural 

 point of view. They meant the substitution of scientific for unscien- 

 tific culture. "It has been found," says Laurence, "by long experi- 

 ence, that common or open fields are great hindrances to the public 

 good, and to the honest improvement which everyone might make of 

 his own." Enclosures brought an extension of arable cultivation and 

 the tillage of inferior soils; and in small farms of 40 to 100 acres, 

 where the land was exhausted by repeated corn crops, the farm build- 

 ings of clay and mud walls and three-fourths of the estate often satu- 

 rated with water, consolidation into farms of 100 to 500 acres meant 

 rotation of crops, leases of nineteen years, and good farm buildings. 

 The period was one of great agricultural advance; the breed of cattle 

 was improved, rotation of crops was generally introduced, the steam- 

 plough was invented, agricultural societies were instituted. 



F. America Recapitulating the History of Agriculture 



13. COLONIAL FARMING 1 

 BY BENJAMIN PERLEY POORE 



The North American aborigines were not an agricultural people; 

 the cultivation of the soil was considered among them as a degrading 

 occupation for the men of the tribes, who left it to the old women and 



1 Adapted from "History of the Agriculture of the United States," Report of 

 the Commissioner of Agriculture for the Year 1866, pp. 498-509. 



