394 



[November, 1912. 



AGRICULTURE AT DUNDEE. 



Section m. of the British Association. 



The following is from the opening address by T. H. Middleton, m.a., 

 President of M. Section. Interest in the practice of improved husbandry- 

 was first aroused in England by the books of Fitzberbert. The extent to 

 which this author stimulated agriculture may be inferred from the appre- 

 ciation 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 the classical writers, He describes the English practice 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 cf the French man," is there any indication that he 

 was influenced by foreign authors. Fitzherbert's " Boke of Husbandry " 

 and "Surueyenge" 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 tbey 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 Hus- 

 bandry," that the classical writers began to exert a direct influence on 

 English farming. 



The First Impetus Towards Progress. 



Both in England and Scotland the first impetus towards progress was 

 economic in its character, and throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth 

 centuries, economic causes were constantly accelerating the improvement 

 of agriculture ; but we must not make the mistake of supposing that a 

 rise in prices necessarily brings about improvements iu husbandry. A 

 motive for improvement is provided and more labour may be drawn to 

 agriculture, but it does not follow that there will be a real advance, and 

 that there will be more food produced for the use of workers in other 

 industries. Without changes of system, i.e,, without improvements based 

 on new discoveries, the effect of a rise of prices in a self-supporting 

 country would merely be to alter the proportion of the population engaged 

 in agriculture, and to form congested districts. This was the danger that 

 threatened England early in the seventeenth and Scotland early in the 

 eighteenth centuries ; but fortunately for each country an intellectual 

 revival followed close on the rise in prices, and attention was directed not 

 only to the necessity for more food but to the need for improvements 

 which would afford a surplus for the support of the industrial classes. 



The Spirit of the Improver. 



Within recent years the improvers of the eighteenth and early 

 nineteenth centuries have been much criticised for their land policy, 

 their enclosures and their treatment of labourers ; but one thing at least 

 the agriculturists of 1760-1815 saw more clearly than then modern critics — 

 they recognised that it their country was to become a great manufactur- 

 ing nation, more food must be grown ; ami to this task they applied them- 

 selves so successfully that, as Porter points out, the laud of Great Britain, 



