220 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. 



But inestimably valuable in result, this national 

 character makes invention excessively difficult, except 

 where it drops in as it were in the course of business, 

 suggests itself to the mind of the workman, and in a 

 workman-like way, to ease him in his task, or to 

 shorten a process done for the thousandth time before 

 the abbreviating link in the chain of practical cause 

 and effect, forced itself upon his notice. Anything 

 like a priori investigation of a problem, elementary 

 view of the principles lying at the root of a process, 

 is the rarest source of invention. Thus it is that a 

 clever machine makes the workmen employed upon it 

 intelligent; as the insect takes its colour from the 

 leaf it feeds on. Discovery follows discovery in rapid 

 succession ; and each room in a cotton mill or manu- 

 factory, we are informed as we pass through, 

 presents an accumulation of little additions and im- 

 provements, a hive of ingenuity as well as industry, 

 all resulting as it were, spontaneously from the sug- 

 gestive influence upon the workman, of the machine 

 that at once employs and instructs him, 



But it is not so in agriculture. The educa- 

 tional effect of the Steam-engine upon those it em- 

 ploys, so strikingly visible in manufactures whose 

 date is of yesterday, Las here not yet begun its gra- 



