Spring Park Farm. 
525 
profitable cultivation and return. Previous to that period I had 
been engaged in mercantile employment, where every question 
was tested by figures, and I had learnt the necessity for keeping 
very accurate accounts. This training has been most serviceable 
to me. By my accounts I have frequently been set right on many 
a question with which I could not otherwise have grappled, and 
by them have gained confidence to enter into expensive improve- 
ments. My farming commenced by my being put in charge of 
2000 acres of highly-cultivated land. Here, with the assistance 
of bailiffs, I began by keeping the accounts by double-entry ; and 
while I was gaining practical information by daily watching what 
was doing on the farms, I was carefully perusing every work on 
agriculture that was recommended to me. The advantage that 
all this has been tome leads me to think the common education of 
the sons of farmers is sadly defective for any business, and more 
particularly for their own. When we reflect how much their 
practice should be dependent on calculation of cost and returns, 
and how greatly they may be benefited by understanding prin- 
ciples of vegetation, and by an acquaintance with chemistry, botany, 
geology, mechanics, and science generally, it is lamentable to see 
how little progress in education has been made by farmers' sons at 
the time of their removal from school : they are generally taken 
away before they are sufficiently advanced to have gained a taste 
for study, and, indeed, frequently before even reading and writing 
have ceased to be a labour; and hence it is, that as a body, 
farmers, although enjoying much more leisure than falls to the 
lot of other classes, have less taste for reading or acquiring in- 
formation. Then, again, their habit of bringing home their sons 
to learn their business, must necessarily present a further obstacle 
to the advancement of agriculture : the narrow practice thus pre- 
sented to the view of the son is hampered by all the prejudices 
of the father ; and in this way is improvement shut out, and the 
barbarous husbandry of an early age made to descend from gene- 
ration to generation. 
But to return ; at the age of twenty-eight years, when by study 
and the opportunity I had had of seeing the practice of others, 
I thought myself competent, I took, at a rent far beyond the 
value, Spring Park, a farm of 500 acres, principally a boggy, 
gravelly soil, which at that time scarcely returned six times 
the seed put on it. I believe the state in which I found this 
farm would have broken the heart of an older or more experienced 
farmer; but I had entered upon it with buoyant spirits, and was 
young, and not of a character to despond ; nor did I then foresee 
the time, labour, and outlay necessary to make such a soil pro- 
fitable, and I fortunately was assisted by an income from other 
sources, which kept increasing, and found me means throuffh a 
2 N 2 
