Five Years Progress of Steam Cultivation. 
363 
with steam-power and a plougliing-macliine, should turn over 
perhaps scores of acres in a day. Some steam machinery, waiving 
all imitation of the long series of old manual processes, might 
strike off the required product from a raw material almost at a 
blow ; but it did not follow that a steam cultivator ought there- 
fore to transform a hard foul staple-soil into a clean crumbled 
seed-bed bv one magical rasp of its tooth. Theory forgot that 
the farmer produces in partnership with Dame Nature (who, 
like other elderly females, will take her own time at the pay-box, 
no matter how eagerly commercial considerations may be 
thronging to press her onward). Prepare your corn land with 
the utmost celerity of execution ; still, the reaping-machine 
will follow some nine months after the drill ; and one seed-bed 
a year is (with a few exceptions) the extent of your possible per- 
formance. Exhaust chemistry for manures to pamper pedigree 
grain and roots : the yield of your one crop per animm is still 
confined within narrow limits of increase ; and the maximum of 
the most valuable produce restricts to comparatively few shillings 
per acre the sum you may profitably expend upon a seed-bed. 
Certainly, the low value of what you can reap or feed off" the slow 
soil debars you from any such coup de main operation as grinding 
up (by a tiavelling earth-mill and the power of James Watt's 
great kettle, pump, and fly-wheel) a stone-baked clay into fine 
powdered mould — say some 1500 tons" weight on each acre. And 
besides, another consequence of having to conduct tillage out of 
doors is that, even if a seed-bed off'-hand could be pecuniarily 
afforded, it would not answer the purpose for which it was de- 
signed. Nature, the farmer's indispensable partner, claims her 
share in his toils, and imposes the conditions under which alone 
he can secure a seed-bed preserving a pulverulent matrix for his 
plants. And as you cannot shovel the whole staple-soil of a 
field into some vast mignonette-box, to water it, warm it, or 
shade it at will, the task left for your mechanical tillage is 
simply to facilitate that tedious but inexpensive aerial action 
which (beyond the wit of man to imitate) fructifies while re- 
ducing tough clods into tilth. Operating, then, in conjunction 
with uncontrollable natural agents, the husbandman can never 
supersede, but only remodel and improve the world-old patient 
delving and uprooting and exposure of masses to atmospheric 
agency ; he can but slice and dig and break up, and then, in 
some lighter after-process, crush and shatter and disintegrate 
clods replete with softening moisture or burst by ice and thaw ; 
while, incidentally, he destroys in premature burial myriads of 
germinating annual weeds, and parches up by exposure, or combs 
out for the ordeal of the furnace, the matted and creeping runnors 
of ineradicable couch. " I had once to attack a fallow field " 
