i6o 
LIFE OF DEAN BUCKLAND. 
[CH. VI. 
drainage, and that these were still of benefit on the ploughed 
land. Dr. Buckland used soot with the wheat, and rags 
used to be ploughed in.” 
Dr. Buckland was a great favourite among the farmers. 
He endeavoured to convey to their minds great facts in 
an amusing strain, and was therefore generally successful 
in his attempts ; and he was, in a marked degree, a 
sympathetic friend and adviser to the labourer, miner, 
and mechanic, from whom, as he was wont to say, “ he had 
learnt many a lesson.” 
In 1842, as the following extract from a letter written to 
Sir H. de la Beche in November of that year shows, he 
was contemplating the purchase of another experimental 
farm at Torrington. 
“ 1 am going,” he writes, “ to look at an estate near 
Torrington to-morrow with a view to purchasing it, if on 
examination it should prove capable of great improve¬ 
ment by thorough draining, sheepfolding, and alternating 
crops of green and grain. I fear the climate is bad, 
four hundred feet above sea, and within twenty miles 
of Dartmoor, over which pass all the south-west winds that 
come to Torrington. The whole is barren coal measures. 
What think you of their reclaimability by Scotch and 
Norfolk husbandry, and of the convertibility of the wet 
rushy clay fields into good meadows by thorough draining ? 
The climate cannot be worse than Scotland.” 
The following letter, written by Sir Robert Peel in 1842, 
illustrates Buckland’s readiness to appreciate and adopt 
any agricultural improvement. Smith of Deanston, whose 
successful experiments on his Scottish farm revolutionised 
the old ideas of drainage, was at this date unknown even 
