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find another member of the Cambridge Science School, Professor Martyn, taking 
some pains to prove that Philip Miller of Chelsea never saw Scotland. Miller 
was so great a gardener, Martyn remarks, that it was generally supposed he 
must have been a Scotchman ; but it was a satisfaction to the Cambridge people of 
1800 to know that this distinguished man (whose name and ancestry had then a 
local interest, for his son was first Curator of the Botanic Garden) had won his 
pre-eminent place in the gardening world on a purely English ancestry. I am not 
satisfied that Martyn was right, but in view of the manner in which the Spirit 
of the Improver was conveyed to Scotland, it would be ungracious to argue the 
point. 
The North Country saying ‘the Gordons hae the guidin’ o’t’ applies to 
agriculture as to much else in Scottish history. In 1706 Lord Huntly married 
the daughter of the soldier Earl of Peterborough, himself a notable Improver. 
Lady Huntly (afterwards that Duchess of Gordon who is extolled by ‘A Lover 
of his Country’) found the north-east of Scotland in the miserable condition in 
which ‘King William’s dark years’ had left it. As late as 1709 many farms 
north of the Grampians were lying waste, the country was depopulated, and the 
state of the labouring poor was wretched in the extreme. Lady Huntly sent to 
England for ploughs and ploughmen and taught her neighbours the methods of 
improved husbandry. Three North Country lairds, stimulated by her example, 
forsook politics and fighting for draining, planting, and experimenting with 
French grasses. Among the three was Sir William Gordon of Invergordon, who 
began those improvements in Easter Ross which have converted the shores of the 
Cromarty Firth into one of the choicest agricultural tracts of Britain. It was to 
share in the improving of this district that my own great-grandfather, later in 
the century, deserted Teesdale for the parish of Cromarty. Thus the work of 
this first group of Scottish Improvers has for me a very direct interest. 
Just as in England a revival of agriculture occurred after the Civil War, 
so in Scotland the disturbances of 1715 were followed by important developments. 
After the Union Scotchmen in increasing numbers took the high road to London, 
and at first with much less profit to themselves than those acquainted with the Scot 
in modern times might suppose. Asa result of social intercourse the upper classes 
began to copy the manners and customs of their rich English neighbours, and 
prices and the cost of living rose rapidly. These economic changes, as in England 
a century before, turned the attention of landowners to the improvement of their 
estates; but as the Scottish laird of the beginning of the eighteenth century did 
not take readily to farming, a few of the more enlightened men among them saw 
that if improvements were to be made special measures were necessary. Im- 
pressed by the usefulness of the Royal Society, these reformers conceived the 
idea of establishing an Agricultural Society in Scotland. This Society, which 
met for the first time in Edinburgh on June 8, 1723, and adopted the name of 
‘The Honourable the Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture in 
Scotland,’ was the first association to be formed for the express purpose of pro- 
moting agriculture. Some account of its work is given in its ‘ Transactions’ 
published twenty years later, but for a contemporary view of the problems which 
engaged the Society’s attention we must go to a book published in Edinburgh 
in 1729 under the title of ‘An Essay on Ways and Means for Inclosing, Fallow- 
ing, Planting, &c., Scotland, and that in Sixteen Years at farthest, by a Lover 
of his Country.’ 
Of all old books on agriculture this is, to me, the most interesting. The 
anonymous writer is believed to have been Brigadier-General Mackintosh of 
Borlum, one of the Rebel Leaders of 1715, who fell into the hands of the English 
at Preston, was imprisoned in Newgate, and sentenced to death. But this 
Highlander was not to be held by English gaolers. With some of his comrades 
he overpowered the prison guard and made good his escape. The Essay was 
written, its author informs us, in ‘my Hermitage ’—supposed to have been a cell 
in Edinburgh Castle—and the writer remarks that he can give no better reason 
for his work ‘ than other Enthusiasts do, the Spirit moves me.’ 
Assuming ‘A Lover of his Country’ to have indeed been Mackintosh of 
Borlum, the prisoner employed his enforced leisure to great advantage. He 
displays more familiarity with the classical authors than any of his predecessors, 
or for that matter than any of his successors, except Harte and Adam Dickson, 
and he had obviously studied all the more important works published in England 
1912. 34 
