If worked between two rows they are termed single, and when between three rows, double cultivators. A riding cultivator adapted to work three rows has an arched axle to pass over the rows of the growing plants and cultivate both sides of the plants in each row. Double cultivators are constructed so that their outside teeth may be adjusted in and out from the centre of the machine to meet the width of the rows between which they operate. A “walking cultivator” is when the operator walks and guides the machine with the hands as with ploughs. Ordinary ploughs are converted into cultivators by supplying them with double adjustable mould boards. Ingenious arrangements generally exist for widening or narrowing the cultivator and for throwing the soil from the centre of the furrow to opposite sides and against the plant. The depth to which the shares or cultivator blades work in the ground may be adjusted by a gauge wheel upon the draught beam, or a roller on the back of the frame.
Disk cultivators are those in which disk blades instead of ploughs are used with which to disturb the soil already broken. As with ploughs, so with cultivators, steam-engines are employed to draw a gang of cultivating teeth or blades, their framework, and the operator seated thereon, to and fro across the field between two or more rows, turning and running the machine at the end of the rows.
Millet’s recent celebrated painting represents a brutal, primitive type of a man leaning heavily on a hoe as ancient and woful in character as the man himself. It is a picture of hopeless drudgery and blank ignorance. Markham, the poet, has seized upon this picture, dwelt eloquently on its horrors, and apostrophised it as if it were a condition now existing. He exclaims,
“O masters, lords and rulers in all lands How will the future reckon with this man?”
The present has already reckoned with him, and he and his awkward implement of drudgery nowhere exist, except as left-over specimens of ancient and pre-historic misery occasionally found in some benighted region of the world.
The plough and the hoe are the chief implements with which man has subdued the earth. Their use has not been confined to the drudge and the slave, but men, the leaders and ornaments of their race, have stood behind them adding to themselves graces, and crowning labor with dignity. Cincinnatus is only one of a long line of public men in ancient and modern times who have served their country in the ploughfield as well as on the field of battle and in the halls of Legislation. We hear the song of the poet rising with that of the lark as he turns the sod. Burns, lamenting that his share uptears the bed of the “wee modest crimson-tipped flower” and sorrowing that he has turned the “Mousie” from its “bit o’ leaves and stibble” by the cruel coulter. The finest natures, tuned too fine to meet the rude blasts of the world, have shrunk like Cowper to rural scenes, and sought with the hoe among flowers and plants for that balm and strength unfound in crowded marts.
But the dignity imparted to the profession of Agriculture by a few has now by the genius of invention become the heritage of all.
While prophets have lamented, and artists have painted, and poets sorrowed over the drudgeries of the tillers of the soil, the tillers have steadily and quietly and with infinite patience and toil worked out their own salvation. They no longer find themselves “plundered and profaned and disinherited,” but they have yoked the forces of nature to their service, and the cultivation of the earth, the sowing of the seed, the nourishment of the plant, have become to them things of pleasurable labour.
With the aid of these inventions which have been turned into their hands by the prolific developments of the century they are, so far as the soil is concerned, no longer “brothers of the ox,” but king of kings and lord of lords.