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XXVI. — Report on the Trials of Steam- Cidticalhig Macliinerij 
at Wolverhampton. By John Algernon Clarke. 
In visilino^ tlie veritable " Black Country," with its scenery of 
chimney-shafts, furnaces, and metalliferous works, its innumer- 
able engines, huge mining machinery, and intersecting network 
of canals and railways, the agriculturist may well have considered 
how largely the industry and riches of this nation are dependent 
upon the cheap unfailing energy of steam. He may have 
reflected that in less than fifty years since the opening of the 
fiist passenger railroad, we have now in Great Britain some ten 
thousand locomotives, running over thirteen thousand miles of 
iron way ; while, probably, two hundred thousand steam-engines 
are driving the mechanism of our mills, worksho])S, mines, and 
factories — to say nothing of the great number of these motive- 
powers afloat, whether for inland, coasting, or ocean navigation. 
And from the estimate that about fourteen thousand threshlnsr 
or barn engines are now at work in this country, barely thirty 
years since the Tuxfords of Boston constructed the earliest 
farm " portable " and the Ransomes of Ipswich made the first 
" traction-engine," he may look forward to a like rapid multi- 
plication of tilling-engines, and of engines for draught upon 
ordinary roads. Already the sets of steam-cultivating apparatus 
in use in England number many hundreds. And while the 
Steam-Plough Works at Leeds, the Britannia Works at Bedford, 
and other works besides, are continuing to open up a great trade 
with occupiers who are adopting steam husbandry, such an 
impetus has been given, to the hiring system by the success of 
double-engine machinery, self-transporting from place to place, 
that several contract men have now their half-dozen sets apiece, 
many have their two, three, or four sets ; and one company, with 
a capital of 42,000/., working in Northumberland and in parts 
of the counties adjacent, finds employment for no less than twenty 
double-engine sets, with which it accomplishes in one year the 
heaivy and light tillage of about 60,000 acres of land. When it 
is known also that, in some districts of the kingdom, farmers 
now give the preference to contract-threshing men, who bring 
and take away both engine and machine without any demand 
upon the farm teams, just as they formerly patronized those of 
the contract men who provided the labour-saving straw-elevator ; 
and when it is known that hauling work, in conveying timber, 
building materials, coal, agricultural produce, and heavy loads 
of all kinds, is being done on a considerable scale by engines 
traversing field-roads and highways, it is clear that the Royal 
Agricultural Society was fully justified in devoting the main 
