49 
,THE EVOLUTION OF AGRICULTURAL 
IMPLEMENTS.—!. 
Agricultural implements, although the oldest of all mechanical 
devices, have improved very slowly since the earliest times of 
which any records exist. The same slowness, indeed, charac- 
terises equally all improvements in agriculture' itself, the art 
being one whose experiments exhaust human life for their solu- 
tion, and refer to the whole catalogue of the sciences for the 
principles on which they depend. 
Saving in certain portions of Western Europe, and in 
North America, the agricultural machinery in use at the 
present time is scarcely in advance of that which was de- 
scribed by Herodotus nearly 2,000 years ago. In the East, 
the plough had been introduced many centuries before the 
Christian era, as the Hebrew Scriptures, and the monuments 
of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia, demonstrate. Colonies, 
migrating at dates of unknown remoteness from Asia into 
Europe, had established centres of agricultural industry, and 
even the manufacture of ploughs, both in Germany and Gaul, 
a thousand years before the birth of Rome, It was from 
these countries that Britain, receiving her earliest inhabitants, 
obtained also such tillage implements as were found in use there 
by the Romans on their arrival. Roman writers acknowledge 
their indebtedness to Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece, Germany, and 
Gaul for their implements of husbandry, and Varro and Virgil, 
writing in the last century B.C., speak of the Roman plough 
as then in course of supersession by that of the two latter 
countries. 
The Egyptian plough had a share, but no coulter or wheels. 
Early Greek ploughs had wheels as w'ell as shares. Pliny and 
Virgil describe the plough of Cis-Alpine Gaul as having wheels, 
and being drawn from shafts. Strutt’s Saxon Rarities of the 
Eighth Century figures a Saxon wheel-plough, and his Complete 
Vieu' of the Manners of England a Norman wheel-plough. The 
Harleian MS. shows a swing-plough drawn from the tails ot 
oxen, a practice which, in 1634, it required a statute of the 
Irish Parliament to abate ; while, finally, the Bayeux Tapestry 
illustrates Saxon ploughs, having coultei's, shares, and wheels. 
Mechanically speaking, these primitive ploughs were all 
equivalents of the modern cultivator, or “ smasher,” being each 
a simple wedge hauled through the soil by means of a beam or 
VOL. III. T. S. — 9 E 
