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XXIII. — Agricultural Maxima. By John C. Morton. 
Instances of extraordinary produce will occur to most men cn 
reviewing ten or twelve years of agricultural experience. It 
must be confessed, indeed, that they have scarcely affected the 
average profits of farming, and that they have hardly at all in- 
fluenced the quantity of food yielded per acre within their neigh- 
bourhoods during the year of their occurrence. A general increase 
of profit and productiveness, by creating employment for more 
labourers, would raise wages, and, as indicating an increased value 
of land, would necessarily raise rents ; but no such results of 
any general progress can be remembered in connection with the 
maximum instances of any man's agricultural experience. They 
have been entirely exceptional occurrences, almost without effect 
on the interests of landlord, labourer, or tenant. Add to this 
that they have been generally owing to the concurrence of extra- 
ordinary natural circumstances acting on good ordinary farming 
rather than to any special effort on the part of the cultivator — 
that, in fact, they have happened rather than been sought — and 
we might suppose that these agricultural maxima were of 
little or no agricultural interest. But this would be a very 
hasty conclusion. Notwithstanding that they generally come 
unsought, it is by an examination of the circumstances out of 
which they have arisen that we are most likely to find out the 
causes of our ordinary as well as of our extraordinary successes ; 
and notwithstanding that these particular instances seem of 
little lasting service, yet it is plainly on the multiplication 
of them that our expectations of increasing agricultural progress 
are most reasonably built. It seems obvious from the his- 
tory of this progress hitherto that our annual produce of food 
is more likely to increase by the general achievement of our 
remarkable successes, than by the establishment or adoption of 
altogether novel doctrine or novel practice. And although most 
of our agricultural maxima have been owing to the concurrence 
of natural advantages independently of the labour of the culti- 
vator, yet no one can examine the agriculture of any considerable 
district without discovering that its most notable instances are 
the artificial result of enterprise and skill. Plainly, it is the 
good cultivator only who gives full scope to the natural influences 
when they happen to be especially favourable. On the ground, 
then, both of the probability of their usefulness, and of the ob- 
vious possibility of gaining practical instruction from them, the 
circumstances of our agricultural maxima deserve examination ; 
and good service will be done by any reader of tliis paper, able 
to recall instances of the kind, who shall communicate the full 
history of them to the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society. 
