'2 
Agricultural Progress and 
culminated in the railway mania of 1845-46. Fortunately for 
agriculture, there were no premiums to be realized by joining 
these societies, so that they were not pushed beyond their legiti- 
mate limits, and have been productive of unmixed benefit. 
Agricultural societies had been tried at a much earlier date. 
"The Bath Society for the encouragement of Agriculture, Arts, 
Manufactures, and Commerce within the Counties of Somerset, 
Wilts, Gloucester, and Dorset, and the City and County of 
Bristol," was formed in 1777. This society claims to be the 
earliest agricultural society founded in Great Britain. The High- 
land Society (Scotland) was constituted in 1784, and received a 
Royal Charter in 1787. The Charter of the English Board of 
Agriculture is dated August 23, 1793. These and other .minor 
societies have doubtless been productive of much benefit in their 
respective localities, and can boast of the names of many patriotic 
and eminent men who enlisted in their ranks ; but the times were 
not favourable for the development of such institutions, and all of 
them fell far short of the dimensions and wide-spread usefulness 
attained by the later societies, and by some of the older institu- 
tions themselves when reorganised at a later date. 
The cause of this is obvious. So long as agricultural societies 
had fixed places of meeting, and the stock and implements in- 
tended for exhibition were conveyed over the ordinary roads, 
they drew their supplies from such limited areas, that their 
showyards were very indifferently furnished, and were only 
attractive to the residents in their immediate neighbourhood. 
From the paucity of their visitors the receipts were small, and 
their funds consequently insufficient to admit of their offering 
such prizes as would tempt more distant owners of stock to face 
the cost and risk of lengthened travel. The societies were thus 
compelled to trust more to donations and subscriptions than to 
the popularity of their shows as their chief source of revenue. 
Energetic managers and liberal patrons may for a time supply the 
place of more general support ; but when the zeal or the strength 
of a few public-spirited individuals fails, societies, so sup- 
ported, are either given up or fall into a state of chronic inaction, 
and it would be easy to prove from the annals of these early 
days that in order to be permanently useful all such societies 
must be self-supporting. Even the Board of Agriculture, with 
its perpetual Charter and Parliamentary grant, formed no excep- 
tion to this rule ; and notwithstanding the talent and energy with, 
which for a time its operations were conducted, and the prestige 
attaching to the honoured names of its president, Sir J. Sinclair, 
and its secretary, Arthur Young, on the extinction of its Parlia- 
mentary grant in 1819, the Board was reduced to the last stage of 
exhaustion, and died a natural death shortly after. 
