marshes of
Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire were covered during some months of every
year by immense clouds of cranes. Some of these races the progress of
cultivation has extirpated. Of others the numbers are so much diminished
that men crowd to gaze at a specimen as at a Bengal tiger, or a Polar
bear. [66]

The progress of this great change can nowhere be more clearly traced
than in the Statute Book. The number of enclosure acts passed since King
George the Second came to the throne exceeds four thousand. The area
enclosed under the authority of those acts exceeds, on a moderate
calculation, ten thousand square miles. How many square miles, which
were formerly uncultivated or ill cultivated, have, during the same
period, been fenced and carefully tilled by the proprietors without any
application to the legislature, can only be conjectured. But it seems
highly probable that a fourth part of England has been, in the course of
little more than a century, turned from a wild into a garden.

Even in those parts of the kingdom which at the close of the reign of
Charles the Second were the best cultivated, the farming, though greatly
improved since the civil war, was not such as would now be thought
skilful. To this day no effectual steps have been taken by public
authority for the purpose of obtaining accurate accounts of the produce
of the English soil. The historian must therefore follow, with some
misgivings, the guidance of those writers on statistics whose reputation
for diligence and fidelity stands highest. At present an average crop of
wheat, rye, barley, oats, and beans, is supposed considerably to exceed
thirty millions of quarters. The crop of wheat would be thought wretched
if it did not exceed twelve millions of quarters. According to the
computation made in the year 1696 by Gregory King, the whole quantity of
wheat, rye, barley, oats, and beans, then annually grown in the kingdom,
was somewhat less than ten millions of quarters. The wheat, which was
then cultivated only on the strongest clay, and consumed only by those
who were in easy circumstances, he estimated at less than two millions
of quarters. Charles Davenant, an acute and well informed though most
unprincipled and rancorous politician, differed from King as to some
of the items of the account, but came to nearly the same general
conclusions. [67]

The rotation of crops was very imperfectly understood. It was known,
indeed, that some vegetables lately