"Welcome green headland! firm beneath his feet; Welcome the friendly bank's refreshing seat; There, warm with toil, his panting horses browse Their sheltering canopy of pendent boughs."
Gone is the green headland; gone the cowslip bank; gone the pendent boughs. The furrow runs up to the extremest point of a vast field without hedges. Gone, too, are the green slips between the lands of common fields. Their very names of "balk" and "feather" are obsolete. These adornments of the landscape are inconsistent with the demands of a population that doubles itself in half a century. The labourer has small rest, and the soil has less. Under the old husbandry, before the culture of the green crops, one-third of the arable land was always idle. Two years of grain-crop, and one year of fallow, was the invariable rule. Look how the land is worked now. The plough and the harrow turn up and pulverize the soil, but they do it much more effectually than of old. The roller is a noble iron instrument, instead of an old pollard. Modern ingenuity has added the clod-crusher. But something was still wanting for the better preparation of land for seed—this is the scarifier or cultivator; which, according to Mr. Pusey, will save one half of the horse-labour employed upon the plough. Into the details of this saving it is no part of our purpose to enter.[19] We give a cut of the implement, covering as much ground in width as 8-1/2 ploughs.
Clod-crusher.
Scarifier.
We proceed to "Instruments used in the Cultivation of Crops." Mr. Pusey tells us that "the sower with his seed-lip has almost vanished from southern England, driven out by a complicated machine, the drill, depositing the seed in rows, and drawn by several horses." We miss the sower; and the next generation may require a commentary upon the many religious and moral images that arose out of his primitive occupation. When James Montgomery says of the seed of knowledge, "broadcast it o'er the land," some may one day ask what "broadcast" means. But the drill does not only sow the seed; it deposits artificial manures for the reception of the seed. The bones that were thrown upon the dunghill are now crushed. The mountains of fertilizing matter that have been accumulated through ages on islands of the Pacific, from the deposits of birds resting in their flight upon rocks of that ocean, and which we call guano, now form a great article of commerce. Superphosphate, prepared from bones, or from the animal remains of geological ages, is another of the precious dusts which the drill economizes. There are even drills for dropping water combined with superphosphate. "Such," says Mr. Pusey, "is the elastic yet accurate pliability with which, in agriculture, mechanism has seconded chemistry." The system of horse-hoeing, which is the great principle of modern husbandry, entirely depends upon the use of the drill. The horse-hoe cannot be worked unless the plants are in rows. Such a hoe as this will clean at once nine rows of wheat, six of beans, and four of turnips. To manage such an instrument requires "a steady and cool hand." The skilled labourer is as essential as the beautiful machine.