714 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION M. 
‘outlandish’ grass seeds and contriving plans for raising pure stocks at home 
in the approved fashion of to-day. 
The importance of such crops as clover, lucerne, sainfoin, and turnips was 
quickly recognised, and agriculturists wished to hear and read more about the 
husbandry of the places from which they had come. Information was supplied 
in the works of the alien writers Plattes and Hartlib; the latter especially, by his 
‘Legacie’ and his ‘Reformed Husbandman,’ did much to popularise a knowledge 
of Continental farming and to suggest ‘the errors, defects, and inconveniences 
of our English husbandry.’ Hartlib was a widely travelled man, and gave 
our Improvers many fresh ideas, among them a suggestion for a ‘Colledge of 
Husbandry,’ but we cannot claim him as an English agriculturist. ( 
It was not only from Brabant and Flanders that travellers brought to 
England information about foreign agriculture. As one result of the develop- 
ment of commerce voyagers were introducing from distant countries such 
important plants as the potato and tobacco, and were exciting interest by their 
stories of foreign products. A desire to make experiments with these novelties 
was brut natural, and experimental farming received a powerful impetus from 
the teachings of Francis Bacon, the first exponent of the inductive method. 
Having, as he wrote, ‘taken all knowledge to be my province,’ Bacon was him- 
self an amateur farmer, and if he was not a successful one he was at least intent, 
upon introducing methods of ‘industrious observation and grounded conclu- 
sions.’ It is to Bacon, I think, that Arthur Young alludes in a passage in which 
he describes a Lord Chancellor of England as having procured and read every 
published work on husbandry so that he might learn how to farm, and who, 
having met with ill-success, collected the offending books and lighted a bonfire! 
But let us not think lightly of the efforts of this distinguished amateur farmer. 
The agricultural writers of the succeeding century, indeed, refer to the influence 
of Bacon in terms that suggest for Agricultural Science the origin of the 
phoenix. We may, at least, agree that about the time of Bacon’s bonfire this 
subject first began to attract the notice of scholars. 
In spite of the political troubles of the second quarter of the seventeenth 
century, agriculture continued to secure increased attention, for England had 
learned that in war or peace the food-supply must be cared for, and the import- 
ance of corn-growing increased with the rise in prices. Thus when the Common- 
wealth was established everything favoured a forward movement. At peace and 
able to return to country pursuits, the combatants, Cavaliers and Roundheads 
alike, became active improvers. Engineer agriculturists, like Vermuyden, car- 
ried out great drainage-works. Many estates had changed hands, and the new 
owners, not a few of whom, as Harte remarks, ‘had risen from the plouch,’ 
were glad to return to it; others were amateur farmers intent on learning. The 
books of the old and trusted writers, Fitzherbert and Tusser, had been followed 
by the works of such authors as Norden, Markham, Plattes, and Hartlib. 
Bacon’s teaching emphasised the need for further study and experiment. 
Behind the political and economic changes were the powerful moral influences 
of the Puritan movement; it was at this time and under these conditions that 
the Spirit of the Improver, which had animated Columella, appeared among 
English agriculturists. 
The first practical farmer to plead the cause of the improvement of agricul- 
ture was Walter Blith, one of Cromwell’s soldiers, who is supposed to have been 
a Yorkshire landowner, but who for some years, at least, was stationed in Ire- 
land. To him may be attributed the first improvements in Irish farming. 
Writing in 1770 Harte says: ‘Ireland it must be confessed had a wretched 
method of husbandry and strong prejudices and beliefs in that method when 
Blythe alone (who then lived in Ireland) was sufficient to open men’s eyes by his 
incomparable writings.’ 
Blith was himself an ardent agriculturist, and prefaced his practical book, 
‘The English Improver Improved,’ by seven epistles designed to attract the atten- 
tion of all classes of his fellow-countrymen to agriculture. These epistles were 
addressed to ‘The Lord Generall Cromwell,’ the ‘Industrious Reader,’ the 
‘Nobility and Gentry,’ the ‘ Honourable Society of the Houses of Court and Uni- 
versities,’ the ‘ Souldiery of these nations of England, Scotland, and Ireland,’ the 
‘Husbandman, Farmer, or Tenant,’ and to the ‘Cottager, Labourer, or Meanest 
