560 
Agricultural Statistics. 
But no detailed description conveys with full success the fea- 
tures of a want, or the advantage of a remedy, which men have 
not yet had the means of practically contrasting for themselves : 
nor is it easy by particular instances to delineate general mis- 
chiefs, such as those resulting to agriculture from an entire 
ignorance of the area and amount of its own produce. It would 
be almost incredible to a person informed as to the commercial 
habits by which this country is best known abroad, but ignorant 
of the anomalies which cling to its agriculture, that no attempt 
has been made till quite recently to obtain any authentic 
returns of that immense portion of the national wealth an- 
nually derived from the capital, the labour, and the skill em- 
ployed upon the land. In the very first paper, and one of the 
not least valuable published in this Journal, the late Mr. Pusey 
draws, from a very simple induction, the result that the per- 
manent addition by improved farming of a single bushel per 
acre upon the general oddmark of wheat " would add to 
the annual income of the nation a sum of 1,200,000/., repre- 
senting a capital of 24 millions sterling, gained for ever to the 
country by this trifling increase in the growth of 07ie article alone 
of farming produce, and that in England and Wales only." 
Since the time when that paper was given to the Society (March, 
1839), and in no small degree aided by the constant efforts 
of the same accomplished mind which so ardently watched 
its progress, there is both reason and evidence to believe that 
the greatest intrinsic advancement agriculture has ever made in 
any country has been realised in this ; while it remains to be 
lamented tliat through the want of a mere piece of recording 
machinery of which the Dynamometer now annually seen in our 
trial-yard presents so apt a symbol, the index is for ever lost, 
which would have actually chronicled and measured the change 
step by step, and furnished one of the most truly interesting 
chapters which a nation can write or read, of its own industrial 
history. 
It is to be borne in mind that, for this country, the resource 
of new inclosure of land is (comparatively speaking) gone by. 
During that period of a nation's agricultural adolescence, Avhen 
fresh inclosure is available, and which may be not inaccurately 
cotemporized in our case with the duration of the last war, from 
1793 to 1815, statistical returns, however interesting in a general 
point of view to the political economist, would to a great extent, 
lose their strictly agricultural character. It is when the demand 
has covered this additional margin of supply, when the resort 
to new land begins to fail, and the resources of art must be drawn 
■upon to increase the produce of the acre to which no new acre 
can be thrown, that the problem of improved husbandry begins 
