6G8 
rROSPECTS OF AGRICULTUllE. 
London, or Tintagcl, than any Welsh or Scotch keep, or 
Wiltshire barrow. All this has changed, and a new spirit has 
come over the scene. VVe see steam-engine smoke rising 
amid the harvest sheaves, and new and strange machines of 
terrible shape for crushing and overpowering the obstinate 
clods. What apparatuses of desperate hooks, spikes, wheels, 
rollers, have we now to subdue the soil; an ancient husband¬ 
man would imagine that they were engines of war. But the 
Duke of Argyll, at the meeting of the Agricultural Society of 
Scotland, has lifted agriculture a step higher still. He gives 
it a fillip, indeed, and applies the scientific spur to it with a 
vengeance. He throws open a new world of invention, and 
draws up the curtain of a most marvellous future. He tells 
the farmer that he does not know his powers, and that they 
will astonish him and everybody else when he comes to know 
them. The farmer is, in fact, that personage who used in old 
times to be called a magician. He can make new animals— 
yes, and nobody knows what new animals will be made before 
very long. This, of course, applies to the breeding farmer. 
The duke is anxious, however, to disclaim any interference 
with the attributes of the Deity. Breeding, he observes, ^fis 
probably not a creative power, and yet it produces results 
which are very closely allied to creation, and perhaps are 
difficult to be separated from it.^^ Mr. Darwin^s book on 
the origin of species suggests this new world of agricultural 
creation ; *^no book which he had ever read contained more 
fertile principles for the progress of agriculture than the book 
of Mr. Darwin.^^ Mr. Darwin^s book ranks high as a philo¬ 
sophical speculation; but if the very large powers of trans¬ 
mutation which are described in that treatise are to have a 
practical direction given them, and if our live stock is really 
going to exhibit specimens of the transcendent elasticity 
attributed in that theory to animal nature, it must be 
admitted that we have a good deal in prospect. The days of 
rural stagnation are certainly over, and we trace a very active 
and lively future before us. Though breeding ‘‘is not a 
creative power,^^ yet “ a power so closely allied to creation^^ 
as the speaker describes will not fail to do wonders. What 
will the metamorphoses be? It is a subject full of exciting 
and anxious interest. What will our Sussexes and Hereford- 
shires, Aberdeenshires, Fifeshires, Galloways, and Holder- 
nesses—what will our short wools and long wools, our 
Southdowns, Leicestershires, Cheviots, and Delameres turn 
into ? There is endless room for conjecture, and imagination 
may exhaust itself in the conception of those different forms 
and organizations which may arise upon the basis of the pre- 
