and on Miscellaneous Inventions at the Birmingham Show. 271 
In a second trial of the horse-power swathcrs on Saturday, 
August 19th, heavy rain stopped a run of the Beverley machine 
in the heavy, laid, and tangled wheat, as the wet stuff could 
not be delivered. On Monday, August 21st, the Judges being 
anxious to test the advantage claimed for this machine of 
special capability for dealing with laid crops, made the condi- 
tion that competitors should cut this tremendous piece of wheat 
in any way, all round or on any side, or, in fact, as they chose 
or as they could. And more than this, they expressly desired 
the representative of the Beverley firm to examine the crop 
closely, in order to determine upon the best way of tackling 
it. The performance was not such as to enable the Judges to 
value the machine as highly for swathing as they had been able 
to value machines in Class 1 for sheafing ; and though the 
Beverley reaper proved itself by far the best in Class 2, the 
total number of points which it gained still fell so far short of 
what constituted perfection, that only the second, instead of the 
first prize, was awarded to it, the other prizes being withheld 
for want of sufficient merit in either the Hornsby swather, or 
the Hornsby six-armed sheafer used as a swather. 
On reference to the Tables, it will be seen that the draught 
of the Beverley reaper per inch-width of cut was 3*86 lbs., very 
little more than the 3*49 lbs. draught of the Hornsby six-armed 
sheafer used as a swather ; while the draught of the Hornsby 
swather was 4*63 lbs. per inch-width of cut. And it is to be 
remembered that, from the manner in which the dynamometer test 
of the Beverley machine had to be made, an excess of the true 
draught must have been registered. For mechanical points, the 
Beverley machine took 480, and the Hornsby swather 420, 
out of 575 constituting perfection ; and for performance, the 
Beverley machine took 375, and the Hornsby machine 320, 
out of 425 constituting perfection. The total points for the 
Hornsby swather were 740, and for the Beverley machine 
855, out of 1000. This carried only the second prize ; and 
comparing this with the awards in Class 1, Sheaf-delivery 
Machines, it is to be observed that the commended machine 
there gained 835 points, the two highly commended reapers took 
908 and 924 respectively ; while the third prize was carried by 
925 points, the second prize by 938, and the first prize by 957 
points. 
The great novelty of the occasion was the Steam Reaping 
Machine of Messrs. Aveling and Porter, of Rochester, Kent 
(Catalogue number 2120). As represented in the illustration, 
Fig. 7, this is a combination of one of Aveling & Porter's 
wonderfully powerful and handy road-locomotives (carrying a 
crane-jib in front), with a propelled reaping machine constructed 
