918 Transactions of the American Institute. 



as a practical affair, appears to have achieved not even a temporary 

 success. Fawkes' steam plow, tried before the executive committee 

 of the Illinois State Agricultural Society in 1858, excited perhaps 

 more attention than any other tested in this country, but in Its 

 practical results, appears to have amounted to nothing more than 

 other traction engine plowing machines had done before it, and in 

 fact, differed from the latter mainly in the employment of a bilge- 

 shaped driving wheel or roller, which it is needless to say was a 

 difference too slight to materially affect the working of the appa- 

 ratus. In Saladie's steam digger, brought forward somewhat later, 

 digging shares were arranged spirally upon a drum carried l>y a 

 locomotive, and designed not only to dig the soil, but to act as 

 paddles to assist the propulsion of the machine, which in its most 

 essential features, Avas simply a revival of Usher's plan of some 

 years before. The principle of operation embodied in some of 

 the earlier English rotary cultivators, was also employed in an 

 apparatus designed by an inventor named Hawkins, but we are not 

 aware that it was ever practically tested. Several other steam cul- 

 tivatinsf devices might be enumerated as having attracted more or 

 less attention within the last decade, but as none of them may 

 justly be said to be either mechanically or financially a success, it 

 is unnecessary to mention them, and we must necessarily come to 

 the conclusion, that in this country, to an extent far gi-eater even 

 than in England, agricultural engineering, even in the only field to 

 which the term has ever been extensively applied, is nothing more 

 nor less than a nonenity; but before proceeding to consider the state 

 of the. subject thus brought to our notice, it may be apropos to 

 speak briefly of the next important mechanical difficulties in the 

 way of steam plowing with traction engines, namely, the loss of 

 power incident to the sinking of the wheels in the soft ground which 

 it is designed to break or disintegrate. We see no way of over- 

 coming this in the use of rotary diggers, except by dispensing with 

 the engine for purposes of draught, substituting horses for draw- 

 ing the machine, and employing steam power to operate the digging 

 mechanism; and we believe that steam culture is capable of being 

 practically developed to advantage on the plan, notwithstanding 

 that a cultivator built to operate on a similar principle, Avas tried in 

 England some years ago with very poor results, possibly arising, 

 we may infer from the description, from want of the care and skill 

 required in the details of construction in mechanism of the kind 

 of which we speak. With reference to the gang-plow system 



