THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. 219 



gener the Hoe ;* and that the perpendicular and very 

 effective action of these manual tools, contrasted with 

 the farm implements of draught, might have dimly 

 suggested the possible discovery of other means of 

 cultivation as different from all of these as they were 

 from each other. Anyone who had ever seen a 

 nutmeg rasped away into fine atoms against the 

 armed surface of a grater, or saw-dust scattered in 

 heaps from timber by the teeth of a circular saw, 

 and could find room in his imaginative faculty for 

 the contemplation of this mechanical process, side by 

 side with the agricultural fact that a seed-bed is only 

 a layer of comminuted soil a few inches in depth, 

 might surely (one should now suppose) have saved 

 the credit of his generation by some more congenial 

 suggestion for the effectuation of tillage by Steam- 

 power, than attempting to bind it down to an ap- 

 prenticeship in which Ploughs and Harrows, Rollers 



* In some of the southern countries of Europe, as in Spain 

 and Portugal, and in the offshoots of the latter Madeira and 

 Brazil the Hoe is the almost exclusive implement of (manual) 

 tillage. The spade is, originally, a form of the Hoe, adapted to 

 more northerly climates, where the moistness of the soil increases 

 the lahour of cultivation by forbidding the tread of the work- 

 man on the worked land, and obliges him to stand on the 'land- 

 side ' of the trench. 



