006 
Agricultural Statistics. 
But meantime, even as we have written, the question has been 
gainino^ ground tliroughout the country. Agricultural societies 
have discussed it ; the agricultural press has been searchingly 
addressed to it. But its importance has received the best of 
involuntary testimony in the heat and controversy raised by every 
published estimate of the year, such as those of Mr. Caird, Mr. 
Morton, Mr. Baker, and many others. In a word, the subject 
has been ripening into one of general interest and demand, and 
that in the proper quarters. It is no longer a mere hole-and- 
corner experiment, to be attempted only by the cheapest or most 
ready-made anti-friction machinery. It is called for by the 
awakened voice and intelligence of an agricultural community 
that would be ill-judged of by the errors of a first and partial 
experiment. The farmer is not the only Englishman who is slow 
in adoption, and slow in change ; but the question required con- 
sideration, and it has been considered ; and we rejoice to have 
seen the venue change itself from boards of guardians to the 
opener court of agricultural societies and farmers' clubs. This is 
the soil in which in Scotland it took root and flourislied, and has 
borne good fruit ; and this is its proper soil in England too. 
In bringing to a close, for the present, a mere preliminary and 
imperfect essay to open a subject itself as yet imperfect, but 
whose growing and self- correcting details will probably furnish 
hereafter a topic of annual notice in the Journal of the Society, 
we would earnestly invite any one who may have hitherto doubted 
the utility, or declined to take part in the task of the collection 
of agricultural statistics, to consider that the ungracious reluctance 
to aid in a cause which is the cause of all, though it may injure 
the accuracy of the proportions, mar the truth and symmetry of 
the result, yet cannot stop the progress of the undertaking. Its 
aim is to exchange doubt for certainty, guesswork for fact, error 
for truth ; and in so doing to hold up a mirror that can neither 
flatter nor distort, exhibiting to British agriculture a sight which 
it has little cause to fear, in a comparative view of the station 
that it holds in the industry of the world. 
