11th. Any green crop, ploughed into the soil, has an effect highly improving; but for this purpose, lupins and buckwheat (cut when in flower) are most proper.
12. Mixed crops (as Indian corn, pumpkins, and peas and oats,) are much and profitably employed, and with less injury to the soil than either corn or oats alone.
SECTION V.
Of Practical Agriculture, and its necessary Instruments.
We begin this part of our subject with a few remarks on the instruments necessary to agriculture, which may be comprised under the well known names of the plough, the harrow, the roller, the threshing-machine, and the fanning mill.
I. Of the plough:
It is among the inscrutable dispensations of Providence, that the arts most useful to man, have been of later discovery—of slower growth, and of less marked improvement, than those that aimed only at his destruction.—At a time, when the phalanx and the legions were invented and perfected, and when the instruments they employed were various and powerful, those of agriculture continued to be few, and simple, and inefficient.
Of the Greek plough, we know nothing; and the general disuse of that described by Virgil and Pliny, furnishes a degree of evidence, that experience has found it incompetent to its objects.—With even the boasted lights of modern knowledge, scientific men are not agreed upon the form and proportion, most proper for this instrument. As in other cases, so in this, there may be no abstract perfection; what is best in one description of soil, may not be so in another; yet, as in all soils, the office of the plough is the same, viz. to cleave and turn over the earth, there cannot but be some definite shape and proportions, better fitted for these purposes, and at the same time less susceptible of resistance, than any other.