408 
POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
to possess a formidable rival in tlie homeliness of practical science 
in its working dress. 
Here may be observed the drainer’s tool, which has con- 
verted into a fertile field, the miasmic haunt where fever lurked, 
and whence he has made his deadly raids upon the neigh- 
bouring centres of population; here is the lineal descendant 
of the crooked Roman plough once guided by the good Cin- 
cinnatus, and which, improved in form, has upheaved the 
tenacious clays of England to the keen disintegrating tooth of 
frost and harrow, changing a churlish receptacle into a fertile 
seed-bed. Again, observe the automaton machine, which de- 
posits the seed in regular hues at an equal depth, accompanied 
by nourishment suited to its earliest development. Near it, 
the implement which follows when the weeds appear, and lays 
low those enemies of the cereal blade. Then we have the iron 
reaper, with his keen swift sickle-edge, before whose radical 
progress the grain bends and falls for preservation when 
ripened by the sun of summer. And, lastly, behold the great 
steam-driven flail, which at once lashes the grain from its retreat 
and assorts it for use. These are but a few typical forms, but 
they suffice to suggest the part played by machinery in the great 
work of food-production, by which the country districts have 
been drained of their population. The last census shows a 
singular decrease in the shnply rustic element. The voids of 
Australia, the back woods of America, the gold-gains of auri- 
ferous regions, and the temptations of large wages in the mills, 
iron-works, and railway enterprises of our own country, have 
drawn Hodge from his quiet village in spite of the law of 
settlement, and yet the business of the farm goes on as well as 
ever. The area of land under cultivation is increased — its fertility 
augmented. Machinery has enabled us to effect the solution 
of an economic problem. Whereas in a savage state one man 
can barely obtain enough from the soil for the supply of his own 
wants and those of his family, we have, through the use of 
machinery, attained a state of civilization, in which the labour of 
one nearly suffices to supply the wants of four men, so that while 
one is retained in the field, three are sent to the towns to work for 
the World’s Great Bazaar, and are supported while thus increas- 
ing the national wealth. The results, therefore, of human skill 
in other departments of this Exhibition may be regarded as 
directly due to the implements of husbandry here less attrac- 
tively displayed, because they have set men free from the cul- 
ture of the soil and the production of essential food, to minister 
to the more luxurious wants that always characterize the pro- 
gress of civilized man. Preserving, then, a due sense of the 
relationship which subsists between the delicate tissues of the 
loom, the ennobling works of art, and the farmer’s wheeled 
