I 



THE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE 231 



Financial difficulties came, chiefly owing to the cost of the 

 surveys, which had been hurried on with undue haste and 

 often with great carelessness, the surveyors sometimes being 

 men who knew nothing of the subject. 



Sinclair was deposed from the presidency in 1798, and 

 succeeded by Lord Somerville. He again was succeeded by 

 Lord Carrington, under whose presidency the board offered 

 premiums (the first of i^20o), owing to the high price of wheat 

 and consequent distress, for essays on the best means of con- 

 verting certain portions of grass land into tillage without 

 exhausting the soil, and of returning the same to grass, after 

 a certain period, in an improved state, or at least without 

 injury. The general report, based on the information derived 

 from these essays, states that no high price of corn or tem- 

 porary distress would justify the ploughing up of old meadows 

 or rich pastures, and that on certain soils well adapted to 

 grass age improves the quality of the pasture to a degree 

 which no system of management on lands broken up and laid 

 down can equal. In spite of this, the cupidity of landowners 

 and farmers, when wheat was a guinea a bushel or at prices 

 near it, led to the ploughing up of much splendid grass land, 

 which was never laid down again until, perhaps in recent years, 

 owing to the low price of grain ; so that some of the land at 

 all events has, owing to bad times, returned to the state best 

 suited to it. 



The board looked upon the enclosure and cultivation of 

 waste lands, which in England they estimated at 6,000,000 

 acres,^ as a panacea for the prevailing distress, and after 

 much opposition they managed to pass through both Houses 

 in 1801 a Bill cheapening and facilitating the process of 

 parliamentary enclosure. This Act, 41 Geo. Ill, c. 109, 

 'extracted a number of clauses from various private Acts 

 and enacted that they should hold good in all cases where 



^ The Report of the Committee on Waste Lands, 1795, estimated wastes 

 and commons at 7,800,000 acres, p. 221. 



