Miscellaneous Implements Exhibited at Cambridge. 467 
the machines makes clear the astonishing advance that has been 
made. 
At this year’s Exhibition thei’e were rustic bridges ; butter- 
makers ; carriages ; churns ; corn drills ; cinder sifters ; steam 
diggers ; draining appliances ; distributors ; electric lighting 
plant ; elevators ; oil, gas, steam, and petroleum engines; ensilage 
appliances ; fencing ; lire engines ; forges ; freezing machines ; 
harrows ; harvesters ; hoists; haymaking machines; incubators ; 
screw jacks ; mangers ; milling machinery ; ploughs ; pumps ; 
mowing machines ; root cutters ; sheep dippers ; sowing 
machines ; stone pickers ; threshing machines ; weighing 
machines ; winnowers ; windmills ; and a lengthy list besides 
of articles of direct and indirect service to the agricultural 
industry. Some of the new implements indicate processes 
unknown to the farmer of 1840 — the binders, incubators, 
refrigerators, ensilage apparatus, &c. — and show the advance 
in the art of agriculture itself as well as in its mechanical appli- 
ances. 
The applications for patents alone for agricultural inven- 
tions now average annually above four times the total of the 
known implements exhibited at Cambridge in 1840. In 1839, 
according to Mr. Pusey, the plough, the threshing machine, and 
the turnip cutter were the only implements in ordinary use. He 
pointed out that “ the use of the drill machine, by which seed 
is laid in regular rows, has lately become frequent in southern 
as well as in northern England, although it has established itself 
so slowly that, for a long time, travelling machines of this kind 
have made yearly journeys from Suffolk as far as Oxfordshire for 
the use of those distant farmers by whom their services are re- 
quired; ” and this only fifty years ago. 
The implements shown at the Oxford Meeting in the year 
Mr. Pusey wrote were, in great part, “ crude, cumbrous, and 
ill-executed machines, the work of village plough wrights and 
hedgeside carpenters” (Parkes’ Liverpool Report, 1841). But, 
three years after, so much benefit had accrued from the massing 
of machines at the Shows, “ and the annual congregating of 
agriculturists and mechanicians from all parts of the empire ; ” 
so many fresh ideas had been developed, that the Engineer of 
the Society was enabled to report that “the manufacture even 
of the commoner implements has already, to a great extent, 
passed out of the hands of the village ploughwright and 
hedgeside carpenter and become transferred to makers possessed 
of great intelligence, skill, and capital ; while examples are 
not wanting in the higher classes of machinery to show that the 
fourth important object for which the Society was incorporated 
