John Algernon Clarl-e. 
687 
special Central Committee of the Council miglit select for the 
purpose. 
The second Inspection Committee consisted of Mr. Robert 
Leeds, Mr. John Nicholson, and Mr. Edward Wortley, with Mr. 
Clarke as secretary, and the area of their operations was very 
large, including Northumberland, York, Lincoln, Nottingham, 
Stafford, Salop, Kent, Montgomery, Worcester, "Warwick, 
Gloucester, Somerset, Dorset, Wilts, Berks, Oxford, Bedford, 
and Northampton. In Mr. Clarke's exhaustive report, which 
appears with those on the same subject by Mr. Howard Reed 
and Mr. John Coleman in Vol. III. of the New Series (18G7), 
the experience of 140 practical farmers on 66,000 acres is 
summed up, and the facts are marshalled with his customary 
lucidity. When the Society decided to give prizes at Wolver- 
hampton (1871) for the best combination of machinery for the 
cultivation of the soil by steam power, Mr. Clarke was naturally 
selected as reporter ; and his masterly report in Vol. VII. of the 
New Series, on the prolonged and expensive trials instituted by 
the Society, is justly described as one of the most valuable con- 
tributions ever made to the Journal. 
The other papers of Mr. Clarke in the Journal included o 
short account of the Lois-Weedon system of wheat-growing 
(Vol. I. New Series, 1865) ; a paper urging the importance 
of increasing our home jn'oduction of poultry (Vol. II. 1866) ; 
the official report on the trials of Reaping Machines at Leam- 
ington, in connection with the Birmingham Show of 1876 
(Vol. XIII.) ; and — a worthy conclusion to his services to the 
Society — the paper on Practical Agriculture for the Memoir on 
the AgTiculture of England and Wales, prepared for the Inter- 
national Congress at Paris in 1878. No one can read this 
paper, or indeed any of Mr. Clarke's articles, without appre- 
ciating and admiring his wonderful grasp of his subject, and the 
skill with which his facts and arguments are marshalled. 
Not only in this Journal, however, but in other agricultura 
publications of the time, Mr. Clarke's busy pen was always 
finding employment. In the year 1857 he began to report 
for the Times the annual country meetings of the " Royal " 
and other Agricultural Societies, and his accounts of the succes- 
sive Shows were always read with more than common interest. 
His great mechanical knowledge and wonderful inventive 
faculty gave to his descriptions and criticisms of new types of 
implements and agricultural machinery generally, a very special 
value. More recently he started in the leading paper a weekly 
column of notes and comments on agricultural subjects, under 
the heading Crop and Stock Prospects." The Tirnes^ too, 
