M,— AGRICULTURE. 243 



of its participants, and in providing the true explanation of the success 

 of many of their empirical processes. Wallarius, the Swede, about 

 1760 was demonstrating the value of humus in promoting soil fertility. 

 De Saussure, the Swiss, towards the end ol the century was explaining 

 the nutrition of plants and their absorption of carbon from the air and 

 ascribing, somewhat inaccurately, their physical stability to the action of 

 phospliates. Thaer, the German (the Hanoverian physician of George 

 III.), in 1804 was founding the first agricultural college in Europe, and 

 pointing the way to Liebig in his discoveries of the ash constituents of 

 plants. Finally, Boussingault, the Frenchman, about 1820, covering 

 the whole range of agricultural chemistry and testing his theories on his 

 estate at Bechalbronn in Alsace, was bringing his influence to bear 

 directly upon the agriculture both of France and of England, and was 

 affording the chief inspiration to Lawes and Gilbert in the successful 

 conduct of their long and beneficent partnership, especially in the em- 

 ployment of the statistical method in calculating the effect of fertilisers 

 upon the growth of plants. It was not in fact until the time of Boussin- 

 gault and I.awes, and after Sir Humphry Davy had, with all his great 

 authority as a chemist, given, as it were, his iviprimatur, that the two 

 separate and converging lines of scientific discovery and agi'icultural 

 practice may be said to have met, and the tv.'o methods — the scientific 

 and the empirical — to have become fused. What Davy, the chemist, 

 foreshadowed, Lawes, the landowner, consummated. 



Throughout this period of agricultural enlightenment there were 

 critics of the px-ogressive but not unfashionable industrial tendencies 

 of the landowners of the day. As Lord Ernie recalls in his recent 

 book,"^ Dr. Edwards in 1783 wrote: 'Gentlemen have no right to be 

 farmers, and their entering upon agriculture to follow it as a business 

 is perhaps a breach of their moral duty.' Nevertheless, large numbers 

 of young men who were heirs to landed estates, as well as sometimes 

 their younger brothers, began to go as pupils to farmers. 



Thus, too, in the earlier days of the eighteenth century the appellation 

 of ' projectors ' was derisively applied to those enterprising amateur 

 farmers who became the pioneers of modern farming. The adoption of 

 any new system of husbandry, such as Jethro TuU's turnip drilling, was 

 deprecated (especially in the Northern counties) by the rank and file 

 of the farming community, on the ground that a rent was payable by 

 the farmer to his landlord, and that the adoption of any innovation was 

 consequently accompanied by grave financial risks. It was the dogged 

 persistence of the ' projectors ' and the obviously remunerative results 

 of their own improved methods which silenced the critics and compelled 

 imitation. 



Fashion is an important factor in du-ecting the activities of persons 

 of independent means, and fashion has frequently in the past been 

 dictated by Eoyal example. Thus in the days of Edward I., who was 

 a gardener, and in those of Edward II., who was a farmer and horse- 

 breeder, there was a temporary and healthy enthusiasm on the part 

 of successive Lords of Berkeley and other great territorial magnates to 

 increase the productiveness of their lands by marling, paring, and 



6 English Farming, Past and Present, 3rd edition, 1922. 



