274 The Development of Agricultural Machinery. 
which he furnished to the Prince Consort at the close of the 
Great Exhibition in 1851 (Journal, Vol. XII. p. 587). He 
says : ' ; It seems proved that, within the last twelve years, since 
annual country shows of implements were established by Lord 
Spencer. Mr. Handley, and others yet living, old implements 
have been improved, and new ones devised, whose performances 
stand the necessary inquiry as to the amount of saving they 
can effect. To ascertain that amount precisely is difficult, but, 
looking through the successive stages of management, and see- 
ing that the owner of a stock-farm is enabled in the prepara- 
tion of his land, by using lighter ploughs, to cast off one horse in 
three, and by adopting other simple tools to dispense altogether 
with a great part of his ploughing ; that, in the culture of crops 
by the various drills, horse labour can be partly reduced, the 
seed otherwise wasted partly saved, or the use of manures greatly 
economised, while the horse-hoe replaces the hoe at one-half 
the expense ; that, at harvest, the American reaper can effect 
thirty men's work, while the Scotch cart replaces the old 
Ensrlish waggon with exactlv half the number of horses : that, 
in preparing corn for man's food, the steam threshing-machine 
saves two-thirds of our former expense ; and, in preparing food 
for stock, the turnip-cutter, at an outlay of 1*., adds 8s. a head 
in one winter to the value of the sheep ; lastly, that in the in- 
dispensable but costly operation of draining, the materials have 
been reduced from 80s. to 15s. — to one-fifth, namely, of their 
former cost — it seems to be proved that the efforts of agricultural 
mechanists have been so far successful as, in all these main 
Irranches of farming labour, taken together, to effect a saving, on 
outgoings, of little less than one-half." 
The question of the value of implements to agriculture, con- 
sidered in the broadest way — viz. by contrasting present condi- 
tions with those which prevailed when every agricultural opera- 
tion was conducted solely by manual labour, as it is, for example, 
in many parts of the far East to-day — may be attacked, quite 
speculatively, it is true, but not, perhaps, unprofitably, in the 
following way. 
Mr. J. C. Morton's interesting paper on the " Forces Em- 
ployed in Agriculture," read before the Society of Arts in 1857, 
demonstrates, among other things, that, for ordinary farm pur- 
poses, a single horse develops the same mechanical effect as 
thirty-two men, while each unit of steam horse-power equals 
the efforts of sixty-six men. Now there are, roughly speaking, 
a million of agricultural labourers employed on the land in 
England, and the wages of these persons amount to 26,000,000/. 
