TTistnrij of the Englis^h Landed hdo'res^t, 735 
typified by that standard came not to sojourn only, but after 
many vicissitudes to dwell, to wax, and to flourish pre-eminently 
on English land. Always politics — warlike fame meant political 
power at Rome, hence great Caesar and his T’e?w', vidi, vici. 
The germ of every great thing is to be found in a preceding 
age, — for reasons to be explained when we consider the Norman 
Conquest — I do not care to inquire whether the Manorial 
system in England was infused directly by the Romans and 
filtered through Anglo-Saxon times, or otherwise ; that system 
was more or less a feudal relation between the lord and his 
copyhold tenants, and be it always remembered that during 
all the Middle Ages the great body of the labouring classes 
were in a state of bondage. It is sufficient for me now to 
express my conviction that the Romans were the founders of 
British agi’iculture. Not so much because their agricultui-al 
settlers and road-making soldiers instructed the natives, but the 
Roman agricultural literature, and notably Palladius, was a 
shining light borne aloft during all the dark ages in England 
by the instructed hands of Latin-reading monastics. All early 
English and foreign agricultural writers founded on the Roman 
principles. 
Mr. Gamier does ample justice to the Roman agricultural 
authors, and especially to Virgil — after Homer the greatest epic 
poet of antiquity — the tall dark man that looked like a farmer, 
who wedded scientific agriculture to melodious and immortal 
verse. It is most noteworthy that agricultural literature 
occupied a far higher position among the ancients than it has 
hitherto obtained in our day — that agriculture which, according 
to Xenophon, is the nursing mother of the arts. 
The agriculture of the ancients should recall the name of 
Adam Dickson, a farming minister, and son of a farming min- 
ister, an associate of East Lothian farmers, who published in 1764 
an admirable treatise on agriculture. This horny-handed pastor 
was killed by a fall from his horse and left a work posthumously 
published in 1788, the fruit of years of anxious study — The 
Hushandrif of the Ancients — in which he traced the analogy be- 
tween ancient and modern agriculture and supplied the connect- 
ing link. Mr. Gamier does not mention Adam Dickson, and 
yet he was an authority after Mr. Garnier’s heart, and after my 
own heart — a practical experienced farmer, and, to boot, a ripe 
and industrious scholar. 
The ancients yearned after principles. As the old law ot 
England well puts it, “ Of everything the chief part is the 
principle.” “ Let us examine the Georgies,” says Mr. Gamier 
— I find Georgies in his index, but, curiously, Virgil is not there. 
