180 
Ohituary. 
Sir James Caird became a practical farmer at the beginning of 
the present reign, and he retained until ^the last his active interest 
in the work of the farm. When he left Edinburgh University, he 
went to Stranraer, where his uncle, Alexander McNeel, was a 
lawyer and bank agent. Soon after, he went into Northumber- 
land to learn farming, and subsequently he managed a farm for his 
uncle a few miles from Stranraer, riding out to the farm early in the 
morning, and returning in time to take some part in the bank or 
law business. 
About the year 1844, he took from the Earl of Galloway a lease 
of a farm at Baldoon. It was a holding with a lot of stiff clay land 
near the sea, and the sudden fall in the price of wheat at the time 
of the abolition of the Corn Laws must have been a serious blow to 
the young farmer. The rent was high, nearly '21. an acre, and it is 
believed that the farm was never really profitable to IMr. Caird. 
The difficulties of working it apparently stirred him up to inquire as 
to possible cures for low prices, and his famous pamphlet on “ High 
Farming as the best Substitute for Protection ” was the outcome of 
his reflections. 
This pamphlet, which appeared in 1849 — when its author 
was thirty-three years old — made a great sensation, and went 
rapidly through eight editions. It was, indeed, the founda 
tion of Mr. Caird’s public fame ; for he was sent by Sir Robert 
Peel in the autumn of 1849 to report upon the agricultural re- 
sources of the west and south of Ireland, and in the next year he 
made, for The Times, an elaborate inquiry into the actual state of 
agriculture in the principal Englisli counties. 
From 1852 to 1865, Mr. Caird was more or less immersed in 
politics, though he found time in 1856 to write for this Journal 
a short note on some experiments he had made as to manures for 
mangel. Whilst he was in the House of Commons, from 1857 
to 1865, he did much excellent public work, and is especially en- 
titled to gratitude for having, after years of fruitless endeavour, 
wrung from the Government of the day a vote for the collection of 
agricultural statistics. The returns for 1866, the result of that 
vote, were the first of a series that have since appeared annually, 
with ever-extending usefulness and completeness. In 1865, Mr. 
Caird accepted office under the Crown as an Enclosure Com- 
missioner, and, for twenty-four years afterwards, until his final 
retirement at the end of 1891, he rendered invaluable services to 
the department which finally, in 1889, became merged in the 
Board of Agriculture. 
It is worthy of note that throughout the whole of Sir James’s 
busy public life he continued to be a practical agriculturist, as well 
as an administrator. At Baldoon, his first holding, he had a large 
dairy, and he introduced into that district the Cheddar system of 
making cheese, with such success that Cheddar is now almost the 
only sort of cheese made in the south-west of Scotland. Besides 
Baldoon, he took in 1864 Langley Park, in Kent, where he had at one 
time about one hundred cows, the milk of which was sent to London. 
