AGRICULTURE AND ITS IMPLEMENTS.
The Egyptians were the earliest and greatest agriculturists, and from
them the art was learned by the Greeks. Greece in the days of her glory
greatly improved the art, and some of her ablest men wrote valuable
treatises on its different topics. Its farmers thoroughly ploughed and
fertilised the soil, used various implements for its cultivation, paid
great attention to the raising of fruits,--the apple, pear, cherry,
plum, quince, peach, lemon, fig and many other varieties suitable to
their climate, and improved the breeds of cattle, horse and sheep. When,
however, social pride and luxurious city life became the dominant
passions, agriculture was left to menials, and the art gradually faded
with the State. Rome in her best days placed farming in high regard. Her
best writers wrote voluminously on agricultural subjects, a tract of
land was allotted to every citizen, which was carefully cultivated, and
these citizen farmers were her worthiest and most honoured sons. The
condition and needs of the soil were studied, its strength replenished
by careful fertilisation, and it was worked with care. There were
ploughs which were made heavy or light as the different soils required,
and there were a variety of farm implements, such as spades, hoes,
harrows and rakes. Grains, such as wheat, barley, rye and oats, were
raised, a variety of fruits and vegetables, and great attention paid to
the breeding of stock. Cato and Varro, Virgil and Columella, Pliny and
Palladius delighted to instruct the farmer and praise his occupation.
But as the Roman Empire grew, its armies absorbed its intelligent
farmers, the tilling of the soil was left to the menial and the slave,
and the Empire and agriculture declined together.
Then came the hordes of northern barbarians pouring in waves over the
southern countries and burying from sight their arts and civilisation.
The gloom of the middle ages then closed down upon the European world.
Whatever good may have been accomplished in other directions by the
crusades, agriculture reached its lowest ebb, save in those instances
where the culture of the soil received attention from monastic
institutions.
The sixteenth century has been fixed upon as the time when Europe awoke
from its long slumber. Then it was after the invention of the printing
press had become well established that publications on agriculture began
to appear. The _Boke of Husbandrie_, in 1523, by Sir Anthony
Fitzherbert; Thomas Tusser’s _Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry_;
Barnaby Googe’s _The Whole Art of Husbandry_; _The Jewel House of Art
and Nature_, by Sir Hugh Platt; the _English Improver_ of Walter Blithe,
and the writings of Sir Richard Weston on the husbandry of Brabant and
Flanders, were the principal torches by which the light on this subject
was handed down through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Further
awakening was had in the eighteenth century, the chief part of which was
given by Jethro Tull, an English agriculturist, who lived, and wrote,
and laboured in the cause between 1680 and 1740. Tull’s leading idea was
the thorough pulverisation of the soil, his doctrines being that plants
derived their nourishment from minute particles of soil, hence the need
of its pulverisation. He invented and introduced a horse hoe, a grain
drill, and a threshing machine.
Next appeared Arthur Young, of England, born in 1741, whose life was
extended into the 19th century, and to whom the world was greatly
indebted for the spread of agricultural knowledge. He devoted frequent
and long journeys to obtaining information on agricultural subjects, and
his writings attracted the attention and assistance of the learned
everywhere. His chief work was the making known widely of the beneficial
effects of ammonia and ammoniacal compounds on vegetation. Many other
useful branches of the subject, clearly treated by him, are found in his
_Annals of Agriculture_. It was this same Arthur Young with whom
Washington corresponded from his quiet retreat at Mount Vernon. After
the close of the War of Independence in 1783 and before the adoption of
the Constitution in 1789 and his elevation to the Presidency in that
year, Washington devoted very much of his time to the cultivation of his
large estate in Virginia. He took great interest in every improvement in
agriculture and its implements. He invented a plough and a rotary seed
drill, improved his harrows and mills, and made many inquiries relative
to the efficacy of ploughs and threshing machines made in England and
other parts of Europe. It was during this period that he opened an
interesting correspondence with Young on improvements in agriculture,
which was carried on even while he was President, and he availed himself
of the proffer of Young’s services to fill an order for seeds and two
ploughs from a London merchant. He also wrote to Robert Cary & Co.,
merchants in London, concerning an engine he had heard of as being
constructed in Switzerland, for pulling up trees and their stumps by the
roots, and ordered one to be sent him if the machine were efficient.
Jefferson, Washington’s great contemporaneous statesman and Virginia
planter, and to whom has been ascribed the chief glory of the American
patent system, himself also an inventor, enriched his country by the
full scientific knowledge he had gained from all Europe of agricultural
pursuits and improvements.
The progress of the art, in a fundamental sense, that is in a knowledge
of the constituents, properties, and needs of the soil, commenced with
the investigations of Sir Humphry Davy at the close of the 18th century,
resulting in his celebrated lectures before the Board of Agriculture
from 1802 to 1812, and his practical experiments in the growth of plants
and the nature of fertilisers. Agricultural societies and boards were a
characteristic product of the eighteenth century in Europe and America.
But this birth, or revival of agricultural studies, the enthusiastic
interest taken therein by its great and learned men, and all its
valuable publications and discoveries, bore comparatively little fruit
in that century. The ignorance and prejudice of the great mass of
farmers led to a determined, and in many instances violent resistance to
the introduction of labour-saving machinery and the practical
application of what they called “book-farming.” A fear of driving people
out of employment led them to make war upon new agricultural machines
and their inventors, as they had upon weaving and spinning inventions.
This war was more marked in England than elsewhere, because there more
of the new machines were first introduced, and the number of labourers
in those fields was the greatest. In America the ignorance took the
milder shape of contempt and prejudice. Farmers refused, for instance,
to use cast-iron ploughs as it was feared they would poison the soil.
So slow was the invention and introduction of new devices, that if Ruth
had revisited the earth at the beginning of the nineteenth century, she
might have seen again in the fields of the husbandmen everywhere the
sickle of the reapers behind whom she gleaned in the fields of Boaz,
heard again the beating on the threshing floor, and felt the old
familiar rush of the winnowing wind. Cincinnatus returning then would
have recognised the plough in common use as about the same in form as
that which he once abandoned on his farm beyond the Tiber.
But with the spread of publications, the extension of learning, the
protection now at last obtained and enforced for inventions, and with
the foundations laid and the guide-posts erected in nearly every art and
science by previous discoverers, inventors and writers, the century was
now ready to start on that career of inventions which has rendered it so
glorious.
As the turning over and loosening of the sod and the soil for the
reception of seed was, and still is the first step in the art of
agriculture, the plough is the first implement to be considered in this
review.
A plough possesses five essential features,--a frame or beam to which
the horses are attached and which is provided with handles by which the
operator guides the plough, a share to sever the bottom of a slice of
land--the furrow--from the land beneath, a mould board following the
share to turn the furrow over to one side, and a landside, the side
opposite the mould board and which presses against the unploughed ground
and steadies the plough. To these have been commonly added a device
called the coulter, which is a knife or sharp disk fastened to the frame
in advance of the share and adapted to cut the sod or soil so that the
furrow may be more easily turned, an adjustable gauge wheel secured to
the beam in advance of the coulter, and which runs upon the surface of
the soil to determine by the distance between the perimeter of the wheel
at the bottom and the bottom of the plough share the depth of the
furrow, and a clevis, which is an adjustable metal strap attached to the
end of the beam to which the draught is secured, and by which the pitch
of the beam and the depth and width of the furrow are regulated. The
general features, the beam, handles, and share, have existed in ploughs
from the earliest ages in history. A plough with a metal share was
referred to by the prophecy of Isaiah seven centuries before Christ,
“They shall beat their swords into plough-shares;” and such a plough
with the coulter and gauge wheel added is found in the Caylus collection
of Greek antiquities. The inventions of centuries in ploughs have
proceeded along the lines of the elements above enumerated.
The leading features of the modern plough with a share and mould board
constructed to run in a certain track and turn its furrows one over
against the other, appear to have originated in Holland in the 18th
century, and from there were made known to England. James Small of
Scotland wrote of and made ploughs having a cast-iron mould board and
cast and wrought iron shares in 1784-85.
In America, about the same time, Thos. Jefferson studied and wrote upon
the proper shape to be given to the mould board.
Charles Newbold in 1797 took out the first patent in the United States
for a plough--all parts cast in one piece of solid iron except the beam
and handles.
It is a favourite idea with some writers and with more talkers, that
when the necessity really arises for an invention the natural inventive
genius of man will at once supply it. Nothing was more needed and sought
after for thirty centuries among tillers of the soil than a good plough,
and what finally supplied it was not necessity alone, but improved
brains. Long were the continued efforts, stimulated no doubt in part by
necessity, but stimulated also by other motives, to which allusion has
already been made, and among which are the love of progress, the hope of
gain, and legislative protection in the possession of inventive
property.
The best plans of writers and inventors of the eighteenth century were
not fully developed until the nineteenth, and it can be safely said that
within the last one hundred years a better plough has been produced than
in all of the thousands of years before. The defects which the
nineteenth century’s improvements in ploughs were designed to remedy can
best be understood by first realising what was the condition of ploughs
in common use when the century opened.
Different parts of the plough, such as the share and coulter, were
constructed of iron, but the general practice among farmers was to make
the beam and frame, handles and mould board of strong and heavy timber.
The beam was straight, long, and heavy, and that and the mould generally
hewed from a tree. The mould board on both sides to prevent its wearing
out too rapidly was covered with more or less thick plates of iron. The
handles were made from crooked branches of trees. “The beam,” it is
said, “was set at any pitch that fancy might dictate, with the handles
fastened on almost at right angles with it, thus leaving the ploughman
little control over his implement which did its work in a very slow and
imperfect manner.” It was some such plough that Lord Kames complained
about in the _Gentleman Farmer_ in 1768, as being used in Scotland--two
horses and two oxen were necessary to pull it, “the ridges in the fields
were high and broad, in fact enormous masses of accumulated earth, that
could not admit of cross ploughing or cultivation; shallow ploughing
universal; ribbing, by which half the land was left untilled, a general
practice over the greater part of Scotland; a continual struggle between
the corn and weeds for superiority.” As late as 1820 an American writer
was making the same complaint. “Your furrows,” he said, “stand up like
the ribs of a lean horse in the month of March. A lazy ploughman may sit
on the beam and count every bout of his day’s work; besides the greatest
objection to all these ploughs is that they do not perform the work well
and the expense is enormous for blacksmith work.” It was complained by
another that it took eight or ten oxen to draw it, a man to ride upon
the beam to keep it on the ground, and a man followed the plough with a
heavy iron hoe to dig up the “baulks.”
The improvements made in the plough during the century have had for
their object to lessen the great friction between the wide, heavy,
ill-formed share and mould board, and the ground, which has been
accomplished by giving to the share a sharp clean tapering form, and to
the mould board a shape best calculated to turn the furrow slice; to
improve the line of draught so that the pull of the team may be most
advantageously employed, which has been effected after long trials,
study and experiment in the arrangement of beam, clevis and draft rod,
setting the coulter at a proper angle and giving the landside a plane
and parallel surface; to increase the wear and lessen the weight of the
parts, which has been accomplished by ingenious processes in treating
the metal of which the parts are composed, and lessening the number of
parts; to render the plough easily repairable by casting the parts in
sets and numbering them, by which any part may be replaced by the
manufacturer without resort to the blacksmith. In short there is no part
of the plough but what has received the most careful attention of the
inventor. This has been evidenced by the fact that in the United States
alone nearly eleven thousand patents on ploughs were issued during the
nineteenth century. When it is considered that all the applications for
these patents were examined as to their novelty, before the grant of the
patent, the enormous amount of study and invention expended on this
article can be appreciated. Among the century’s improvements in this
line is the use of disks in place of the old shovel blades to penetrate
the earth and revolve in contact therewith. Cutting disks are harnessed
to steam motors and are adapted to break up at one operation a wide
strip of ground. The long-studied problem of employing a gang of ploughs
to plough back and forth and successfully operated by steam has been
solved, and electricity is now being introduced as a motor in place of
steam. Thus millions of broad acres which never would have been
otherwise turned are now cultivated. The tired muscle-strained ploughman
who homeward plodded his weary way at night may now comfortably ride at
his ease upon the plough, while at the same time the beasts that pull it
have a lighter load than ever before.
Next to the plough among the implements for breaking, clearing and
otherwise preparing the soil for the reception of seed, comes the
_harrow_. From time immemorial it has been customary to arm some sort of
a frame with wooden or iron spikes to scratch the earth after the
ploughing. But this century has greatly improved the old constructions.
Harrows are now found everywhere made in sections to give flexibility to
the frame; collected in gangs to increase the extent of operation; made
with disks instead of spikes, with which to cut the roots of weeds and
separate the soil, instead of merely scratching them. A still later
invention, curved spring teeth, has been found far superior to spikes or
disks in throwing up, separating and pulverising the soil. A harrow
comprising two ranks of oppositely curved trailing teeth is especially
popular in some countries. These three distinct classes of harrows, the
disk type, the curved spring tooth type, and gangs of sections of
concavo-convex disks, particularly distinguish this class of implements
from the old forms of previous ages.