16 
Jethro Tull : Ids Life, Times, and Teaching. 
its subsequent covei-ing with, soil, that oue half of the seed 
should come up earlier than the other, and with a view to enable 
a portion at least of the young plant to escape the ravages of 
the turnip fly. The manner of delivering the seeds in both 
these drills was by notched barrels : Tail's essential principle 
was, in feeding the seeds, the use of cavities in the surface of 
solid cylinders. 
Necessarily in those days there were vast difficulties in 
construction, the extent of which it is difficult for us to estimate. 
We now have perfect tools, standard gauges universally accepted 
and machines for measuring to the one-millionth of an inch. In 
Tull's day, and long after, inventors — James Watt, for example — 
were tortured by blundering mechanics with the rudest tools 
and inadequate appliances. TuU's seed-boxes were made, we 
are told, ' " by Mr. Bennet, a very ingenious mathematical 
instrument maker in Crown Court, Soho."' Turning from the 
subject of the original drill, now only of historical interest, TuU's 
own pregnant sentence may be cited as summing up that 
question : " I owe my principles and practice originally to my 
travels, as I owe my drill to my organ." 
Nature and wisdom always say the same thing. Tull's 
attention to detail was extraordinary — perhaps unparalleled.^ 
Indoors and out he was always studying the open book of Nature, 
and doubtless made- many notes afterwards utilised in his 
published book. " No canon," he says, " having limited what 
we shall think in agriculture, nor condemned any of its tenets 
for heresy, every man is therein a freethinker, and must think 
according to his reason, whether he will or no." The foregoing 
fine sentence is no doubt highly characteristic of the man. " It 
is," he says, " in the interest of every one who lives by bread 
that true principles be established in agriculture, but none ought 
to be allowed as such until they have been thoroughly examined ; 
every man is well satisfied by experiments made by himself." 
With the practical eye of an experienced husbandman he experi- 
mented, he entered into the habits and properties of plants, their 
production and nutrition. In sickness even his bedchamber 
was filled with various plants, with their roots, in whole or in 
part, so disposed in pure water or mixed fluids as to be under 
observation. In short, he treated the living, growing sentient 
plants of the farm as a zoologist or biologist might study the 
ways, tastes, and habits of some rare and curious animal. 
Tull's usual saying, says his Hungerford friend, was this, 
habitually repeated : " Thei'e's more than a rent odds in saying 
(Jetitlcman's Magazine, 1 764. 
• Cijclo. Brit. 
