Agricultural Statistics. 
573 
tirea of the kingdom : though the value of its agricultural pro- 
duce far exceeded the results of all the other branches of in- 
dustry it contained. Macaulay notices tliat in the maps of the 
Itinerarium Anglia?, published by John Ogilby, Cosmographer 
Royal, in 1675, the roads through inclosed country being marked 
by lines, those through uninclosed by dots, the dots seem very 
predominant. From Abingdon to Gloucester, nearly 50 miles, 
there was not a single inclosure, and scarcely one from Biggles- 
wade to Lincoln. In the drawings of English landscapes, made 
in that age for the Grand Duke Cosmo, now in the British 
Museum, scarcely a hedgerow is to be seen, and numerous tracts 
now rich with cultivation, and routes now exhibiting an endless 
succession of fertile landscape, run through nothing but heath 
and swamp, and warren. " At Enfield," proceeds that dis- 
tinguished writer, 
*' Hardly out of sight of the smoke of the capital, was a region of 25 miles 
in circumference which contained onlj' three houses, and scarcely any inclosed 
fields. Deer as free as in an American forest wandered there by thousands. 
The rod-deer were then as common in the uplands of Gloucestershire and 
Hampshire as they now are among the Grampian Hills. On one occasion 
Queen Anne on her way to Portsmouth saw a herd of no less than five 
hundred. The wild bull with his white mane was still found ■\\-andering in a 
few of the southern forests. The badger made his dark and tortuous hole on 
the side of every hill where the copse wood grew thick. The wild cats were 
frequently heard by night wailing round the lodges of the rangers of Whittle- 
bury and Needlewood. The yellow-breasted marten was still pursuedj in 
Cranbourne Chase for his fur, reputed inferior only to that of the sable. 
Fen eagles, measuring more than nine feet between the extremities of the 
wings, preyed on fish along the coast of Norfolk. On all the downs, from the 
British Channel to Yorkshire, huge bustards strayed in troops of fifty or sixty, 
and were often hunted with greyhounds. The marshes of Cambridgeshire and 
Lincolnshire were covered during some months of every year by immense 
clouds of cranes. Some of these races the progi'css of cultivation has extir- 
pated. Of others the numbers are so much diminished that men crowd to 
gaz(! at a specimen as at a Bengal tiger or a Polar bear. 
" The progress of this great change can nowhere be more clearly traced than 
in the Statute-book. The number of inclosure acts passed since King 
George II. came to the throne exceeds four thousand. The area enclosed 
under the authority of those acts exceeds, on a moderate calculation, ten 
thousand square miles. How many square miles which formerly laid waste 
have, during the same period, been fenced and carefully tilled by the proprie- 
tors, without any application to the legislature, can only be conjectured. 
" But it seems highly probable that a fourth part of England has been, in 
the course of little more than a century, turned from a wild into a garden. 
Even in those parts of the kingdom ^vhich, at the close of the reign of 
Charles II., were the best cultivated, the fanning, though greatly improved 
since the civil war, was not such as would now be thought skilful. To this 
day no effectual steps have been taken by public authority for the pui-pose of 
obtaining accurate accounts of the produce of the English soil. The historian 
must therefore follow, with some misgivings, the guidance of those writers on 
statistics whose reputation for diligence and fidelity stands highest. At pre- 
sent an average crop of wheat, rye, barley, oats, and hearts is supposed consider- 
ably to exceed thirty millions of quarters. The crop of wheat would be 
VOL. XVI. 2 P 
