228 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. 



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 with us 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 

 manufactory, we are informed as we pass through, 

 presents an accumulation of little additions and 

 improvements, 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. 



Not so in Agriculture ! The educational effect of 

 the Steam-engine upon those it employs, so strikingly 

 visible in manufactures whose date is of yesterday, 

 has here not begun its gracious operation. Here the 

 new power has not yet come in to suggest new pro- 

 cesses. The hind ploughs as his fathers ploughed, as 



