256 The Evolution q/ Agricultural Implements. 
greatly by a patent, dated 1862, whereby the machine was, for 
the first time, made capable of laying pipes on an incline. In 
spite, however, of much skill and ingenuity lavished on the pro- 
blem of mole-ploughs, these, together with drain-ploughs, have 
receded in public favour of late years, probably because they 
have proved unable to compete successfully with the ordinary 
hand drainage tools. 
It remains to notice the third, or rotary, class of draining 
appliances for which many patents, both English and American, 
have been taken out, without much visible approach to success. 
Such is Eddington’s drainage tool, patented in 1865, a machine 
which opens the drain, lays down the pipes, and fills in again in 
the rear. Such also is Hobson and Hardman’s machine, ex- 
hibited at the Royal Agricultural Society’s Show in 1881, look- 
ing like a stranded dredger, excavating by an endless chain of 
buckets, of which there are two series, one following, and 
cutting deeper than, the other. The body of the machine 
contains the drain-pipes, which descend, through a curved “ pipe 
conductor,” into the trench formed by the buckets, where they 
are left lying in sequence as the machine advances. The dug 
soil is elevated, just as in a dredger, and discharged into shoots, 
whence it falls back into the trench from which it was originally 
removed, covering the drain-pipes that have, meanwhile, been 
laid therein. Promising as it appeared at Derby, the Robson 
and Hardman appliance has, so far, rendered little practical 
service to agriculture, and with it closes the list of aspirants who 
have come forward at various times to claim the still unappro- 
])riated Gold IMedal offered by the Royal Agricultural Society 
for a really good draining implement. 
Class IX. — Appliances for the Reclamation of Land. 
England is so often compared to a garden that Englishmen 
scarcely realise how many millions of acres of waste land still 
exist in these islands. More than one-fifth of all Ireland is un- 
cultivated, Connaught, its smallest province, containing a million 
and a half of unreclaimed acres. In some parts of Scotland 
matters are worse. Sutherlandshire, for example, is hardly 
scratched by the plough, not a fortieth part of its area being yet 
under cultivation, notwithstanding the efforts at reclamation 
which have been made in this county by the Duke of Suther- 
land, in conjunction with Messrs. John Fowler and Co., of Leeds. 
Heathcote, of Tiverton, already alluded to, was one of the 
first English landowners to undertake important works of 
drainage and reclamation bymeans of machinery, in 1832. Heath- 
