to the Cultivation of the Land. 
219 
meated by atmospheric agencies, to yield up its native and con- 
tinually absorbed stores of fertility in prolific abundance to 
the roots of acquisitive plants. And by deep pulverizing and 
weed-eradicating steam tillage, without expensive digging or 
horse trench-ploughing, the land has now become deep, rich, and 
friable as a garden, of which the noble specimens of mangold 
exhibited at the last Baker-street Show, are pretty good evidence. 
I have not seen Mr. Smith's farming since July, 1857, when I 
made one of a large concourse of visitors assembled for a 
" field-day." At that time, a 3-tined grubber, worked by a 
7-horse threshing-engine, was tearing up a stiff-clay clover- 
lea to a depth of 7 or 8 inches. This field had been 
under oats before the clover, beans the year before, and wheat 
before that, soon after a fallow, and had borne all these crops 
without once being turned over with the plough, yet the land 
was clean as a garden. In other fields I saw growing magnificent 
crops of peas and oats also upon steam-tilled land. This wheat 
had been put in without ploughing, the ground was prepared by 
once breaking-up (5 acres a day including " shifts '') with the 
steam-grubber at 5s. 2d. per acre, and once crossing with a 
horse cultivator at 2s. per acre, or 7.9. 2d. altogether, to which add 
Is. Gd. per acre for wear and tear, making a total cost of 8s. 8c?. 
an acre. Contrast this with the old method in which one 
ploughing with horses would alone cost 14s. For liis mangold 
crop he had simply carted 12 loads of farmyard manure on to a 
clean wheat-stubble (for his system of never burying the " filth " 
kept the land free from couch), worked his double-mouldboard 
plough with subsoil tines following, so as to trench 10 inches 
deep, throwing the land into drills or ridges, and covering up the 
manure within them ; tliis cost 8s. 8^/. an acre. He then bottomed 
the open spaces with his single-tine subsoil plough, drawn by 
horses, at 3s. per acre, making lis. Sd., to which add Is. Qd. for 
wear and tear, bringing the total cost up to 13.v. 2d. per acre. 
How many farmers have prepared their land for drilling or dib- 
bling mangold at anything like so small a cost? Beans I found 
a magnificent crop, and the wheat very heavy, promising 6 quarters 
per acre, and in beautifully clean condition. 
Mr. Smith stated, that while he had always worked five 
or six horses and a strong pony under the old order of things, 
he last year sold off three horses ; since then the two horses and 
the pony supplementing the work of the 7-horse power steam- 
engine (which was cultivating only 20 days in a year), had 
performed all the tillage and draft-labour of the farm, excepting, 
indeed, that horses had been borrowed from his Bedfordshire 
occupation to assist in harvesting, in subsoil-ploughing, and a 
