The Development of Agricultural Machinery. 
271 
others dined together and discussed implements — and splendidly 
constructed implements his were. I have bits of them of that 
date in use now. Having given our orders, he forwarded them, 
either by his own or hackney horses, from Leiston to Soham, 
near Newmarket. There our cattle met them, and drew the 
wondrous inventions to our reedy homesteads." Who is not 
interested to know that among the competitors in the Liverpool 
ploughing match (18-11) was a Bedfordshire lad, not yet twenty 
years of age, who brought an iron plough, constructed at his 
father's works from his own design, and that it was an object 
of much curiosity ? This was no other than the late James 
Howard, who, finding no one to whom he was inclined to 
entrust the implement, took off his coat and guided it himself, 
his practice at the Priory Farm, Bedford, having made him so 
expert that he secured for this " patent Scotch two-wheeled 
plough " one of the eleven prizes awarded for this description 
of implement. Or how Mr. Pell himself fell in, for the first 
time, with Mr. Howard and his famous harrows at the South- 
ampton Show in 1844: "I have a remembrance of a fresh- 
coloured young man meeting me as I drew near these zigzag 
tormentors of the soil, and pointing out their charms with such 
insinuating effect that 1 became their purchaser on the spot. 
This is how we got the harrows from the Royal Show-yard to 
Ely in Cambridgeshire — first by rail to Nine Elms, next to an 
inn in the Old Bailey, the terminu3 of a carrier's cart which got 
them on to Cambridge, whence another of Hobson's calling 
transferred them to Ely. They arrived in time for the autumn 
wheat-seeding ! " 
How welcome are even these scanty sketches of one or two 
of the " Pioneers " ! Would that Mr. Pell's memory and 
humour could present the readers of the Journal with many 
similar portraits ! 
The question finally arises, What, after all, have these 
inventors, improvers, and their solicitous nurses, done for the 
agriculturist ? All the agricultural world knows that Mr. C. S. 
Read has replied to this inquiry by an emphatic " Nothing ! " 
But the same gentleman has said the same thing of all science, 
whether chemical, physiological, or mechanical, in its application 
to agriculture ; and much will be forgiven to a paradox-loving 
nature, capable, like his, of affording the keenest enjoyment to 
an audience while science is wittily minimised during a delight- 
ful hour, and even practice itself treated as " a poor thing, my 
lord, but mine own." 
If, however, pace Mr. Read, one question can answer another, 
