720 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION M. 
late in life; if, further, we remember that his health was bad, and that his 
appliances for scientific study were indifferent—‘ my microscope, indeed, is but 
a very ordinary one,’ he writes—we must give him a foremost place among the 
scientific agriculturists, uot only of the eighteenth century, but of all time. His 
wide knowledge and keen reasoning place his ‘ Horse-hoeing Husbandry’ in a 
class by itself among the works of the early Improvers. 
Jethro Tull’s great work was published two generations after Walter Blith 
first endeavoured to awaken the Spirit of the Improver in English farmers. 
Throughout this period not much progress had been made, but a change was at 
hand. When in 1730 Turnip Townshend left politics and went down to Norfolk 
to farm his estates, the tide had turned, and henceforward throughout the 
eighteenth century there was a rapid improvement in the practice of English 
agriculture. Of these developments no small share may be attributed to the 
influence exercised by the Royal Society during the first seventy years of its 
existence, ; 
The agriculture of Scotland had not shared in the revival due to the work 
and writings of the English Improvers, and was in a very backward state in the 
middle of the seventeenth century. Its condition is indicated by John Ray, who 
in 1661, some months before the Royal Society received its charter, set out from 
Cambridge to spend the Long Vacation in a Scottish tour. He crossed the Tweed 
on August 16, and proceeded from Berwick, vid Dunbar, to Edinburgh. His first 
day’s Journal gives us his impressions of what is now, and probably was then, 
one of the foremost agricultural districts in Scotland. ‘The ground in the 
valleys and plains bears good corn,’ he says, but ‘ the people seem to be very lazy, 
at least the men.’ Scottish women, he writes, ‘are not very cleanly in their 
houses, and but sluttish in dressing their meat.’ ‘They have neither good bread, 
cheese, or drink. They cannot make them, nor will they learn. Their butter is 
indifferent, and one would wonder how they contrive to make it so bad.’ 
‘There is evidence in the Journal that this rude fare disagreed with the 
traveller, who had but recently quitted Trinity ‘high table,’ and he is unduly 
severe on the people of the Lothians. He draws attention, for example, to the 
plainness of the Scottish women and the vanity of the men; he criticises Edin- 
burgh, and having studied its architecture he remarks on the College that ‘the 
building of it is meaii and of no great capacity, in both comparable to Caius 
College.’ Surely a superfluous comment in the Journal of a Scholar of St. Cathe- 
rine’s and a Fellow of Trinity! 
Ray’s speech appears to have been as unguarded as his Journal, for he records 
that ‘the Scots cannot endure to hear their country or their countrymen spoken 
against,’ and it is indeed a fortunate thing that he did not seek to cross the Tay. 
It would have gone ill with him in 1661 had he ventured to criticise the High- 
landers or their food and drink. English Science would, I fear, have suffered 
an irreparable loss, and there might have been no sufficient reason for that 
Cambridge Club whose members engage at festive gatherings to prevent the 
association of the name of Ray with indifferent viands. 
Agricultural affairs in Scotland became worse instead of better after Ray’s 
visit, for a series of disastrous seasons set in as the century drew toa close. In 
August 1694 we are told that ‘ a cold east wind accompanied by a dense sulphurous 
fog passed over the country, and the half-filled corn was struck down with 
mildew.’ So bad was the harvest that Hugh Miller tells of the children of a 
Cromarty farmer who spent the whole winter trying to pick out seed corn from the 
blighted crop. In the following year summer and winter were alike tempestuous, 
and thereafter for five seasons there was scarcity, amounting in some districts 
to famine. By 1701, when the climate began to improve, much land had gone 
out of cultivation. Landowners could not get tenants to take vacant farms, and 
the outlook was of the gloomiest. But a change was at hand, and at the time 
when Lisle and Laurence were deploring the lack of interest which English 
gentlemen manifested in rural economy, Scotland was beginning those improve- 
ments which in a century made Scottish agriculture and gardening the best in 
Europe. It is indeed a remarkable circumstance that four generations after 
John Ray recorded his impressions of this lazy, backward nation, we should 
