Steam-digging Machine . 
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relieved, most earnestly avoid. After breakfast, wc 
walked across the tongue of Slopen Main ; and shaking 
my kind host. Captain Booth, cordially by the hand, 
embarked for Ralph's Bay Neck in his boat. After four 
hours’ dead pull to windward, against a strong breeze 
and heavy sea, we landed on the further shore of 
Frederick Henry Bay. From this, a walk of seven miles 
through Rokeby and Clarence Plains conducted to 
Kangaroo Point. Here we again took boat, and, in 
another half hour, trod the shores of Sullivan’s Cove, 
where I shall for the present call a halt, hoping that the 
reader may have derived pleasure, if not profit, from my 
excursion to Port Arthur. 
Art. V . Account of a proposed Steam-digging Machine. 
By Capt. A. F. Cotton, Madras Engineers. 
It is very remarkable that, while so powerful and 
manageable an agent as steam should have been so 
universally applied in commerce, and in the arts and 
manufactures, it should as yet have been scarcely at all 
introduced into agriculture. There has indeed been, for 
some years, a suspicion in the minds of a very few, that 
the preparation of the soil might be accomplished by it, 
and several persons have expended considerable sums in 
experiments upon ploughing by steam ; but as yet it 
cannot be said that anything of consequence has been 
accomplished. That ploughing by steam is practicable, I 
have no doubt; and I have also no doubt, that the reason 
why it has yet made so little progress is mainly owing 
to the astonishing ditficulty of overcoming the prejudices 
of the mass of mankind. After having applied the steam- 
engine to ninety-nine purposes, it seems as difficult to 
