38 
Agricultural Progress and 
Any considerable deviation from tTie four-course system of hus- 
bandry was then believed to inflict such injury upon the land 
that letting a farm so treated would be like selling a lame horse, 
and would require a heavy sacrifice on the part of the owner. 
Now, however, no one disputes that " condition " can be restored 
to the land by a certain amount of exposure to the atmosphere 
and a certain amount of manuring, the materials for which can 
be purchased at most market-towns. In short, it is a mere 
question of a moderate amount of money applied with 'ordinary 
discretion, and not, as was formerly thought, the happy result 
of much money applied with great skill through an indefinite 
period of years, and which, when realized, ought to be guarded 
like the golden apples of famous memory. 
The evident tendency of the present day is to make agreements 
extremely simple, to allow an in-coming tenant to be as little 
hampered as possible by the operations of his predecessor, but to 
r devote the capital, whose possession ought to be a sine qua not), to a 
thorough stocking and manuring of his farm, instead of battling 
about tillages and half tillages, and expending his capital on 
" unexhausted improvements," the existence of which is in many 
cases highly problematical. In order to combine freedom to 
the in-coming with justice to the outgoing tenant, the sugges- 
tion already made is thrown out with some confidence, viz., 
to give to all tenants-at-will an additional year's notice, and 
thus enable them to reimburse themselves instead of hampering 
their successors. 
Improvements in Cultivation and Farm Management. — To a 
bond fide agriculturist the most interesting part of agricultural 
progress is that connected with cultivation and farm management ; 
and the improvements to be noticed under this head are neither 
few nor unimportant. But though numerous and of various kinds, 
they chiefly spring from one source, which in itself is the most 
characteristic feature of the period in question, and may be de- 
scribed as the substitution of sound reasoning and arithmetical 
calculation for the empirical knowledge so much relied upon by 
our ancestors. That mixture of tradition and guess-work was 
certainly valuable in the absence of any sounder system, but 
was never to be relied upon when the circumstances under which 
it was acquired, whether of soil, season, or situation, were mate- 
rially altered. In the first book of Euclid there is a proposition 
near the commencement which is familiarly known as the " Asses' 
Bridge ;" and undoubtedly any student who makes himself 
thoroughly acquainted with that theorem has made an im- 
portant step towards mastering the Elements of Geometry. In 
the past twenty-five years agriculturists have similarly bridged 
