Jetiiro Tall: his Life, Times, and Teaching. 19 
Cutlibert Johnson Collection there are sketches of the tumbledown 
little old granary and little old stable as they appeared in 1840. 
Tull had a two-pronged hoe, which he called a " bidens," 
and, for mellow ground, one with three prongs, called by him a 
"tridens;" one of these last was found in the mud at the bottom 
of the well at " Prosperous." ' A heavy and rudely made hoeing 
tool, such as an old roadman might use for scraping down and 
spreading road metal, it was probably pitched contemptuously 
into the well by one of Tull's bitter foes — an idle, disgusted and 
ultra-conservative farm-labourer. 
Tull says, " I keep a team of horses, but only for the use of my 
tile-kiln. I do not use oxen, only bulls, bought in when they 
are cheapest, and I have them castrated." An original in all 
things, he had for this operation a method of his own. " They 
are called bull-stags. I yoke three in a hoe-plough." Cobbett, 
in his Rural Bides, mentions two " pilgrimages " to " Prosperous," 
and writes of Tull's radical husbandry — that is, going to the root 
— feeding the growing plant by deep tillage. The second visit 
was on November 20, 1821. Cobbett observes, " with Mr. Budd * 
I rode to-day to the farm of Tull ; my companion did the same 
thing with Arthur Young twenty-seven years ago — it was a sort 
of pilgrimage." 
We are told, by his friend and original biographer,'^ Tull set 
out at " Prosperous " with a firm resolution to perfect his under- 
taking in spite of the opposition of the lower class of husband- 
men. He revised and improved all his old implements and con- 
tidved new ones, and generally pushed on his new system, 
demonstrating to all the world the good effects of his horse- 
hoeing culture. He grew without manure successive wheat 
crops on the same ground for thirteen years, and superior to 
that grown by his neighbours in the ordinary course, labour 
and tillage supplying the place of manure and fallow, and with 
the saving of at least two-thirds of the seed-wheat — a saving in 
the aggregate of the food of millions upon millions of people.'' 
' The hoe is said to have been at one time in the possession of the Eoyal 
Agricultmral Society. Figured in the Cuthhert Johnson Collection. 
An eccentric attorney of Newbury ; an ardent admirer of Cobbett. Many 
of his publislied letters are dated from Budd's farmhouse, Burghclere. 
' Gentleman's -Magazine, n6i. 
* Sir John Lawes was so good as to read this paper, and he has favoured 
me with the following observations : — " Tull is quite an original genius, and a 
century in advance of his time. I consider he has been most unjustly accused 
of not placing sufficient value upon farm-yard manure ; he advocated cleanli- 
ness, and saw dung was a great carrier of weeds. To give some clear idea of 
the value of Tull's advocacy of drill husbandry, and the freedom from weed, 
which can alone be obtained by the use of the drill, I may mention that, so far 
as statistics will allow, 1 Lave ascertained the average yield of the wheat crop 
c 2 
