The Development of Agricultural Machinery. 2GD 
of the " Combined Machine," and the firm establishment of rick-* 
side steam-threshing as common practice. 
Mr. Pell, describing threshing in the days when there were 
ilo movable steam-engines, says : — " One saw four, or even 
six, splendid mares, up to their hocks in straw> as fat and sleek 
as moles, going round and round in the meekest way, with a 
very small boy and over-balancing whip revolving on a little 
stage in the centre of the circle, whose duty it was to flick their 
backs in turn, and to keep up a perpetual litany of ' Now 
then, Smiler ! ' ' Get along, Beauty ! ' ' What are you at, 
Diamond ! ' ' Gee-hup, Blackbird ! ' ' Darn you, Charley ! ' 
' Whoy-hoop, Smiler ! ' But in the dark evenings when Smiler 
and Beauty and Charley were hunting each other round the 
cribs in the horse-yard, the rattle of the threshing-machine 
might be heard in the great barn and the gleam of candle-light 
be seen through the cracks of the door. Iuside is a tread- 
wheel geared to the drum. Six or eight ' honest ' men toil up 
it, a relay of the same number are sitting on the straw or on 
corn-bags. The master's great silver watch hangs on a nail 
under the candle to regulate the shifts, and heavy men are at 
a premium. Thus they threshed the large fen and open-field 
crops ; this now obsolete method, the practice of something 
much under a century, having succeeded to the previously un- 
changed and simpler practice of the ages." 
The first appearance of Fowler's draining-plough, in 1850, 
raised a new excitement, which, growing with the rapid develop- 
ment of this implement into the steam-plough, culminated in a 
fever of interest in the great question of steam-cultivation, a 
question which was threshed out in the most thorough and 
determined manner by the Society, whether by trials or by 
original investigation, during the twenty years following upon 
the appearance of Fowler's pregnant " Mole " at Exeter. 
Another interest, second only in keenness to that created 
by steam-tillage, accompanied the latter from 1851, and out- 
lasted it by several years, being, indeed, scarcely yet exhausted. 
Mr. Pusey's description and trial of McCormick's Reaper in 
1851 gave a stimulus to curiosity, but raised no enthusiasm 
on the subject of mechanical harvesting. The Society, how- 
ever, duly experimented with every new Reaper appearing 
between that date and 1862, when a practical form of automatic 
sheaf delivery first made its appearance. Then the agricultural 
world " caught on " to, and has never since ceased to interest 
itself in, the improvement of reaping-machines. Excitement 
upon this subject, within the four corners of the Society's 
domain, began with the Manchester trials of 18G9, and cul- 
