PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 711 
was despoiled by her Roman conqueror, it does not seem improbable that associa- 
tions for the advancement of agriculture may have existed in ancient times. 
But if such associations did exist, they either neglected to appoint recorders 
or their records were among the many old writings on husbandry which are 
known to have been lost. It is certain that Columella, who in the first century 
of our era garnered the wisdom from all known works on agriculture, had never 
heard or read of associations for promoting agriculture. For in his First Book on 
Husbandry he laments the absence both of the means of instruction and of the 
desire for study among his fellow-countrymen, and, writing of agricultural educa- 
tion, he sorrowfully describes how in the case of other arts, ‘ everyone sends for a 
person from the society and assembly of the wise to form his mind and instruct 
him in the precepts of virtue; but Husbandry alone, which, without all doubt, is 
next to, and as it were near akin to wisdom, is in want of both masters and 
scholars.’ And he proceeds, ‘ For hitherto, I have not only heard that there are, 
but I have myself seen, schools of professors of Rhetoric, and as I have already 
said of Geometry and Music; or, which is more to be wondered at, academies for 
most contemptible vices, for delicately dressing and seasoning of victuals, for 
contriving and making up dainty and costly dishes for promoting gluttony and 
luxury; and I have also seen head-dressers and hair-trimmers; but, of Agri- 
culture, I have never known any that professed themselves either teachers or 
students.’ 
These quotations, while they show that associations for the advancement of 
agriculture were unknown to Columella, also show the Roman writer to have been 
fired with that zeal for knowledge which possessed our own Improvers of Agri- 
culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nor is it a difficult task to 
trace back to the ancients the ‘ Spirit of the Improver,’ which appeared in England 
about the middle of the seventeenth century. The influence of the classical 
writers may indeed be traced in the second half of the sixteenth century; but at 
that period English agriculturists were impressed only by the practice of the 
ancients, as exemplified in the careful rural economy of Roman husbandmen ; the 
knowledge, or science, of agriculture—on the importance of which several of the 
ancient writers have discourséd at length—did not attract Englishmen before 
Bacon’s time. 
Interest in the practice of improved husbandry was first arou8ed in England 
by the books of Fitzherbert. The extent to which this author stimulated agricul- 
ture may be inferred from the appreciation with which his works were received in 
his own day, and copied by others for a century. He himself does not appear to 
have been acquainted with tl*e classical writers. He describes the English prac- 
tices with which he was familiar; he quotes frequently from the Scriptures and 
refers to early religious works, but only in writing of animal diseases, when he 
cites the ‘Sayinge of the Frenche man,’ is there any indication that he was 
influenced by foreign authors. Fitzherbert’s ‘Boke of Husbandry’ and ‘Sur- 
ueyenge,’ while they are free from the direct influence of Roman writers, show 
us, nevertheless, that the English agriculture of his day owed much to Roman 
traditions. The careful business methods and accounting of the farm bailiffs of 
the Middle Ages, with which Thorold Rogers has acquainted us, were the 
methods which Fitzherbert learned and counselled, as they were the methods 
which Columella taught. 
It was between 1523, when Fitzherbert’s ‘Boke of Husbandry’ was first 
printed, and 1557, when Tusser published his ‘ Points of Good Husbandry,’ that 
the classical writers began to exert a direct influence on English farming. In 
1532 * there appeared Xenophon’s ‘Treatise of Householde,’ ‘ ryht counnyngly 
translated out of the Greke tonge into Englyshe by Gentian Hervet,’ which at 
once became popular and ran through a number of editions, At least as early 
as 1542 editions of the works on agriculture and gardening of Cato, Varro, 
* I quote from the edition published in 1745 by A. Millar, London. 
* The earliest edition in the Cambridge University Library is dated 1537, but 
Dr. Peter Giles informs me that the earliest copy in the British Museum is 
dated 1534, and that, according to the old Bodleian Catalogue, Oxford had a 
copy dated 1532. My own copy is a 1767 reprint which describes Hervet’s 
translation (in 1537 bound in one volume with Fitzherbert’s Husbandry and ~ 
Surveying) as having been extremely popular. 
