276 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



is in the soil, how is it possible you should know what you ought 

 to spread upon it," &c. 



STEAM CULTURE. 



The real object of all this machine culture is to take the plac€ 

 of the horse, but the £500 premium offered by the Royal Agri- 

 cultural Society of England, for an economical substitute for the 

 plow and spade, is one of those impossibilities too gross to be 

 seriously entertained. 



Boydell's Traction Engine is capable of applying more than its 

 steam force to the cultivation of comparatively level land. In 

 other words its traction force is greater than its motor force. 



The celebrated Mr. Mechi, whose attempted improvements in 

 agriculture have made much noise among farmers and others, has 

 become an altered and a wiser man, a great deal of the wild and 

 visionary has disappeared, he is daily becoming more of a farmer 

 and less of a mere experimentalist. He has become a regular 

 attendant at the London Farmer's Club. 



[The Pr.actical Mechanic's Journal. London, August 1, 1856.] 



The Royal Agricultural Society at Chelmsford, July 11, 1856, 

 trial of plows, etc., Boydell's steam locomotive for the field was 

 started in the light land field and it went gallantly over the undu- 

 lations of the earth dragging a great compound plow of Mr. 

 Coleman's. The engine did its duty well but the ploughing 

 machine to which it was harnessed did irregular work. It is 

 indeed a seven fold apparatus, seven plows being disposed in a V 

 form. And the difficulty was in the tendency of the cutters to 

 get out of fair work and the regulation of the depth according to 

 the form of the ridge. But the great novelty of the show con- 

 sisted in two rival plans of steam ploughing with a stationary 

 engine and windlass, wire ropes and anchored pullies. 



Mr. Smith of Woolston Bucks, has an arrangement of machinery 

 by which, with a seven horse power engine, he has ploughed one 

 hundred acres of his own farm, at a cost of sevc7i shillings an acre, 

 doing four or five acres every day. 



Grass is good grown in April or May, but is bad food for cattle 

 in August, September, October and November. But all grass 

 grown upon rich land, after midsummer, is good and nutritious 



