50 
The Erohifion of AgncuHurnl Imflemenif. 
pole fastened to its heel. It is an interesting fact, of which 
more hereafter, that modern practice, after liaving long aban- 
doned “ smashing ” in favour of the neatly turned furrow- 
slice, is now returning to the same system of ploughing as 
that which distinguished the earliest efforts of man to cultivate 
the soil. 
The seed, after being scattered, either from the seed-box ” 
or “ sowing-sheet,” was usually ploughed in by the ancients; but 
the Egyptians, Romans, Saxons, and Gauls used for this purpose 
an implement distinct from the plough, which, slightly scratch- 
ing the soil, effected what Roman writers call its “ scarification,” 
the equivalent of modern harrowing. The Assyrian monuments 
demonstrate that a drill-plough was used at least 500 years 
before Christ, and a figure of it is given in Mr. Allen’s Digest of 
American Seeding Machines. 
Pliny says that the Romans employed two-handed scythes as 
well as one-handed sickles, and that with the former a man could 
mow a “ jugerum,” or about three-quarters of an acre, of hay dail)". 
The tyer, who, in Roman times, followed the mower, is described 
as making 1,200 bundles of hay, weighing 4 lb. each, in a day, 
and these bundles were stoi’ed in barns like grain. Corn was 
reaped by the Romans with a sickle, cutting half-straw high, 
and the grain was bound into sheaves and stored in bams 
ready for threshing. 
Upon none of the Egyptian monuments, on the other hand, 
is the long-handled scythe depicted, a smooth-edged sickle 
being used for cutting hay and a serrated sickle for corn. 
Only the ears of wheat were cut off by the Egyptians, and these 
were carried in baskets to the granary, whence they finally 
found their way to the pestle and mortar, which freed the grain 
from chaff. 
Pliny has described a Gallic reaping-machine, and Varro 
also mentions, witliout describing, a reaping-machine which he 
had seen in Germany. There is little doubt that the latter, like 
the former implement, consisted of a row of closely-set prongs 
which, being urged forward by a pair of oxen, snatched, or 
stripped, the ripe ears of corn from the straw and delivered 
them into a box provided for their reception. 
Ancient threshing-machines consisted of the floor and the 
flail. Grain was usually separated from the straw by “the ox 
that treadeth out the corn,” but Isaiah makes poetical mention 
of what might well have been rollers drawn over the threshing- 
floor to complete the separation of grain and chaff. The Roman 
“ tribulum ” had a similar function, and was drawn by means of 
oxen over the crop to be threshed. The mortar was used, as 
