Jeiiiro Tull : his Life, Times, and Teaching. 
5 
in detail and colour. Some thirty years ago, Cutlibert Johnson, 
F.R.S., an able and voluminous agricultiiral writer, took infinite 
pains, as a labour of love, to collect materials by search, by corre- 
spondence, by advertisement, and by the offer of a money reward. 
Yet, though happily his quest succeeded to some extent, he failed 
in tracing even the place where, after life's fitful fever, all that 
was mortal of weary Tull was laid to rest. Mr. Cuthbert Johnson ' 
— who has generously sown for others to reap— thus prefaces his 
valuable MS. collection : " I have laboured to collect information 
for a persona] history of this famous man, but to little purpose — 
his own incidental notices of himself are the most important." 
To digress for a little while in the directions just now sug- 
gested : the art of agriculture, in the sense of practice with 
science, flourished under the Romans — :Virgil, that prince of 
Latin poets, wrote his Georgics about thirty years B.C. — then 
agriculture pined and dwindled away during the dark ages A.D. 
486-1400, being kept alive only by monasticism and by the 
learning of the monks. An interesting illustration of this fact 
appears in a recent publication. ^ Walter Mapes, canon of 
St. Paul's, archdeacon of Oxford in 1196, wrote in the Welsh 
language a still extant treatise on agriculture. When Caxton, 
the wonderful London haberdasher, set up his printing press at 
Westminster, a fresh and ever-increasing impulse was given to 
British agriculture, which has continuously ramified and extended 
to overspread the civilised world. Agricultural biography, 
chronologically arranged, containing a notice of the life and 
writings of the British authors on agriculture from the earliest 
date in 1480 to 1854, has been usefully compiled by Donaldson : 
he founds on previous works by West and by Loudon. A glance 
at the evolution of agricultural science during the period now in 
question, namely, from the general use of printing to the date of 
the new husbandry of Tull, should be useful and instructive. 
No doubt every inventor has stirred up some pre-existing but 
latent germs of his discovery. Tull is the eighty-first name on 
the list of recorded agricultural authors. On analysis, thirty- 
' I am greatly indebted to Dr. Cuthbert Johnson, of Waldronhurst, Croydon, 
for having placed at my dispo.?al the Tullian Collection of his late nncle, Mr. 
Cuthbert W. Johnson, F.R.S., larrister-at-law — a Collection which could 
have been formed only by an able man, after devoting to a congenial task 
much patient and laborious research. His personal contribution is chiefly a 
review and critique of Tull's book. A very appreciative notice of this volu- 
minous agricultural author will be found in Donaldson's J gricnltwal Biography, 
London, 1854. 
Gerald the Welshman. Henry Owen, B.C.L., Corpus Christi Coll. Oxon. 
London. 1889. 
