Arthur Young. 
7 
It was at Lord Shelburne's house he became intimate with 
Dr. Priestley, and so acquired a taste for pneumatic chemistry. 
In his forcible and witty mode of expressing himself he says, “ I 
have been engaged in examining air, to be sure — I have been 
washing fixed air and hanging it out to dry.” 
He was now a Fellow of the Koyal Society, an Honorary 
Member of the learned Societies of Dublin, York, and Manchester, 
the Economical Society of Berne, the Palatine Academy of 
Agriculture at Mannheim, and the Physical Society of Zurich. 
His literary ability and authority as an agricultural observer 
and critic were universally acknowledged. Still he was wholly 
unable to turn his extensive knowledge to profitable account, 
even on the very limited area of a hundred-acre farm. Pro- 
bably his imagination, acted on by the varied lights in which 
agriculture in many countries came under his notice, outran 
his means and power for effective administration and unfitted 
him for plodding processes and the monotonous routine of 
business, for the neglect of which nothing compensates where 
the end is money profit. If it be true that he who would make 
farming pay must ever bear in mind that it is a business of 
small economies, it is not difficult to imagine how such a man 
as Arthur Young entirely failed in the occupation. He cared 
for none of these things. 
His vivacity, his buoyant spirit, the sort of muscular irrita- 
bility that ever kept him on the move, his eagerness to study 
new methods and to compare new things with old, the ardour 
with which he demolished antiquated prejudices and practices 
and insisted on substituting methods and doctrines entirely at 
variance with the gospel of centuries, his love of gaiety and 
bright society, his very converse with men of science and states- 
men, themselves far ahead of the times, unfitted him for the 
cautious and monotonous undertakings of a practical farmer. 
And still, his life for a time and his occupation being that 
of a farmer, he had been forced into their circumstances, had 
shared their difficulties, had felt the effect of the obstacles 
which legislation and old customs placed in their paths, inspiring 
him with a burning zeal for measures of reform. Thus we hear 
without surprise that he was the first person to introduce the 
cultivation of artificial grasses, collecting the seed by his own 
hand and sowing it. It was Arthur Young who brought more 
especially into notice among the grasses cocksfoot and crested 
dogstail, and who laid such stress on scientific courses in hus- 
bandry. Very early in life, during his residence at Lynn, his 
time seems to have been divided between dancing and reading ; 
and so, being possessed of more than the ordinary share of 
