Nor can I
omit, in this connection, to revive, so far as I may, the image of a
small Devon farmer, who had lived, and I dare say will die, utterly
ignorant of the instructions of Tull, or of the agricultural labors of
Arthur Young: a short, wheezy, rotund figure of a man, with ruddy
face,--fastening the _h_s in his talk most blunderingly,--driving over
to the market-town every fair-day, with pretty samples of wheat or
barley in his dog-cart,--believing in the royal family like a
gospel,--limiting his reading to glances at the "Times" in the
tap-room,--looking with an evil eye upon railways, (which, in that day,
had not intruded farther than Exeter into his shire,)--distrusting
terribly the spread of "eddication": it "doan't help the work-folk any;
for, d' ye see, they've to keep a mind on their pleughing and craps; and
as for the b'ys, the big uns must mind the beasts, and the little uns's
got enough to do a-scaring the demed rooks. Gads! what hodds to them,
please your Honor, what Darby is a-dooin' up in Lunnun, or what
Lewis-Philup is a-dooin' with the Frenchers?" And the ruddy
farmer-gentleman stirs his toddy afresh, lays his right leg caressingly
over his left leg, admires his white-topped boots, and is the picture of
British complacency. I hope he is living; I hope he stirs his toddy
still in the tap-room of the inn by the pretty Erme River; but I hope
that he has grown wiser as he has grown older, and that he has given
over his wheezy curses at the engine as it hurtles past on the iron way
to Plymouth and to Penzance.

* * * * *

The work was not all done for the agriculture and the agriculturist of
England in the last century; it is hardly all done yet; it is doubtful
if it will be done so as to close investigation and ripen method in our
time. There was room for a corps of fresh workers at the opening of the
present century; nor was such a corps lacking.

About the year 1808, a certain John Christian Curwen, Member of
Parliament, and dating from Cumberland, wrote "Hints on Agricultural
Subjects," a big octavo volume, in which he suggests the steaming of
potatoes for horses, as a substitute for hay; but it does not appear
that the suggestion was well received. To his credit, however, it may be
said, that, in the same book, he urged the system of "soiling"
cattle,--a system which even now needs its earnest expounders, and which
would give full warrant for their loudest exhortatio