106 Agricultural Weights and Measures. 
more than Is. per acre ; and, in all, the expense of harvesting 
may be more than double what has been named.” 
These remarks are still wonderfully true in spite of all the 
improvements ; but it is not too much to say that notwith- 
standing scarcity of labour and higher wages the total cost of 
harvesting may, with the help of self-binders, be executed 
at about the same cost that Mr. Morton estimated it at in 
1868. Personally, I think Mr. Morton’s estimate of 2s. 4 d. 
for pitching, loading, and carrying too low, even under the 
best possible management, at the time in which he wrote. 
John Wrightson. 
Charford Manor House, 
Downton, Wilts. 
AGRICULTURAL WEIGHTS AND MEASURES. 
I 
“ In the beginning was Chaos,” wrote Hesiod, earliest of agricul- 
tural critics. He was not speaking of our present theme, but 
he easily might have been and he might no less easily have 
connected it with that agricultural depression upon which he 
was fond of dwelling. In his day, as in ours, agricultural 
weights and measures were in a state of all but hopeless 
confusion ; in his day, as in ours, farmers were the losers by 
this confusion, yet did very little to remedy it. That something 
like 2,700 years have elapsed without the civilised world making 
any sustained effort to facilitate barter and exchange in the 
greatest of its industries is amazing ; yet such is the fact. 
The ancient Creeks were so enterprising in their geometry 
that the very name for its earlier books is that of a Greek, 
Euclid , and their love of proportion has never been equalled 
by later races. Yet their agricultural weights and measures 
were inextricably confused, and we need not now study them, 
seeing that, like certain words, they “admit of no defence.” 
Their method of progression seems to have been 1 : 15 : 60 : 
180 : 8,040 ; and the only explanation of such want of order 
must be that the middlemen then, as now, thought that they 
gained by making barter a mystery and that then, as now, 
they had the whip hand both of consumer and producer. 
The ancient Romans had a system rather like ours, for their 
modius was practically a peck, their semimodius was practically 
a gallon, and their sextarius Avas practically a pint. Then they 
suddenly Avent off into the scale of 12, and a cyathus was 
the twelfth of a pint. 
That the barbarians introduced nothing like uniformity 
goes without saying. But that the subtle Arabians avIio 
gave us their figures never hit upon a Avorking system for 
