52 
The Evolution of Agricultural Implements. 
ing-macliines, haymakers, horse-rakes, stacking-machines, hay 
and straw compressors. 
4. Machines for preparing crops for market, — including 
threshing-machines, elevators, and winnowing-machines. 
5. Machines for preparing crops for food, — including grind- 
ing-mills, chaff-cutters, root-cutters, oil-cake breakers, and gorse 
mills. 
6. Dairy appliances, — including cream separators, churns, 
butter workers, refrigerators, and cheese presses. 
To these six classes, including machinery of strictly agricul- 
tural character only, there must be added as follows : — 
7. Prime movers. 
8. Drainage machinery, — including draining-ploughs, trench- 
ing-machines, and pipe-laying apparatus. 
9. Appliances for the reclamation of land, — including steam- 
ploughs of special construction, discers, and pulverising 
harrows. 
To the above machines, all of which are closely connected 
with the conduct of ordinary agriculture, there might very 
properly be added appliances for road-making, the ii'rigation 
of land, the manufacture of manures and cattle foods, the 
washing, drying and packing of hops, the retting, breaking 
and scutching of flax, and mechanical forestry. It will, how- 
ever, sufficiently extend the space of this essay to sketch the 
history, state the functions, and describe the more important of 
the machines already enumerated. 
Class I. — Tillage Implements. 
Ploughs . — It was not until the middle of the seventeenth 
century that the rude plough of antiquity was improved in any 
important particular, its development, in the first instance, taking 
rather a remarkable course. 
In 1649, Walter Blith, an officer of Cromwell’s army, de- 
scribed, in a book called England's Improvement, a double-furrow 
plough, in foi’m like two ordinary ploughs having their respective 
beams secured together, the handles of the front plough and the 
fore part of the hind plough being both cut off. In 1730, Ellis, 
of Hoddesdon, Herts, followed with an improvement on Blith’s 
plans, and such was the success of these two implements that 
Arthur Young, Avriting in 1771, speaks of the double plough as 
in high favour and in extensive use among farmers of that day. 
In 1802, Lord Somerville, who gave much time and thought to 
this subject, patented a form of double-furrow plough having 
only one beam, curved in the middle so as to adapt it for carry- 
