210 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. 



Steam-power offer any cheaper, better, or more direct 

 mode of performing it, than manual or animal power 

 had done ? Could it accomplish in one act the problem 

 of converting the hard clod into fine soil ? Could it, 

 like the mole, cut a seed-bed out of the solid ? If so, 

 why entangle it with implements foreign to its nature, 

 unessential to its action, and behind it in that order 

 of inventive progress whose deep-cut label is ' Vestigia 

 nitlla RETRORSUM ' ? 



' But the Plough had left its ridge-and-furrow im- 

 press not more in the fields than, alas ! on the mind 

 of the agriculturist of that day. It was long, and 

 naturally so, before he could bring an imagination 

 preoccupied with the old-established system of field - 

 culture, to recognize its impending emancipation from 

 the whole chain of subordinate necessities exacted by 

 the employment of horse-labour. The old fable had 

 become reversed : the quadruped was riding the man : 

 and to shake him off was now the difficulty ! For 

 a century after its invention, the Steam-engine lay 

 stillborn to the soil, and the virtue unappreciated of 

 a new power which could antiquate mere implements 

 altogether, and convert the cultivating agent into a 

 machine, in the strict sense of the word ; a machine 

 whose locomotion across the field was a mere colla- 



