lands. Barley and
oats were more often grown than wheat. Dibbling or drilling of grain,
notwithstanding Platt and Jethro Tull, were still rare. The wet
clay-lands had, for the most part, no drainage, save the open furrows
which were as old as the teachings of Xenophon; indeed, it will hardly
be credited, when I state that it is only so late as 1843 that a certain
gardener, John Reade by name, at the Derby Show of the Royal
Agricultural Society, exhibited certain cylindrical pipes, which he had
formed by wrapping damp clay around a smooth billet of wood, and with
which he "had been in the habit of draining the hot-beds of his master."
A sagacious engineer who was present, and saw these, examined them
closely, and, calling the attention of Earl Spencer (the eminent
agriculturist) to them, said, "My Lord, with them I can drain all
England."

It was not until about 1830 that the subsoil-plough of Mr. Smith of
Deanston was first contrived for special work upon the lands of
Perthshire. Notwithstanding all the brilliant successes of Bakewell,
long-legged, raw-boned cattle were admired by the majority of British
farmers at the opening of this century, and elephantine monsters of this
description were dragged about England in vans for exhibition. It was
only in 1798 that the "Smithfield Club" was inaugurated for the show of
fat cattle, by the Duke of Bedford, Lord Somerville, Arthur Young, and
others; and it was about the same period that young Jonas Webb (whose
life has latterly been illustrated by a glowing chapter from Elihu
Burritt) used to ride upon the Norfolk bucks bred by his grandfather,
and, with a quick sense of discomfort from their sharp backs, vowed,
that, when he "grew a man, he'd make better saddles for them"; and he
did, as every one knows who has ever seen a good type of the Brabaham
flock.

The Royal Agricultural Society dates from 1838. In 1835 Sir Robert Peel
presented a farmers' club at Tamworth with "two iron ploughs of the best
construction," and when he inquired after them and their work the
following year, the report was that the wooden mould-board was better:
"We tried 'em, but we be all of one mind, that the iron made the weeds
grow." And I can recall a bright morning in January of 1845, when I made
two bouts around a field in the middle of the best dairy-district of
Devonshire, at the stilts of a plough so cumbrous and ineffective that a
thrifty New-England farmer would have discarded it at sight.