“The ploughs are attached to an endless chain, one hundred and fifty yards in length. They can be detached at pleasure, or shifted from one side of the chain to the other. They travel at the rate of five miles an hour. Provision is made in case they strike against any impediment.”

Arrangements are also made to suit irregularly shaped fields. The full power of the engine is not exerted with the ploughs, as thus described; and the number of blades can be increased if desirable. And now for the next statement, which brings us to a most important consideration.

“In the present state of things, it is difficult to form a correct estimate of the value of the invention in a commercial point of view. I will only say that a machine of the power, and with the arrangement described, would perform the work usually done by sixteen ploughs, driven by as many men, and drawn by thirty-two horses. Requiring itself the attendance of eight men, and a horse to draw the water for the engine, it would thus save the labour of thirty-one horses and eight men. Against this must be set an expense of five shillings a day for coals.”

In examining the question of economy in the use of steam-power instead of horses, we shall obtain valuable assistance from a paper addressed to Mr. J. T. Osborne, of Demerara, by the Council of the Highland Society. This paper sets the period of the productive labour of a horse against the unproductive period necessary for its rest, and exhibits results of a startling kind. Horses are fed and tended three hundred and sixty-five days of twenty-four hours, or eight thousand seven hundred and sixty hours in the year. But they work only three hundred days, of about eight hours, taking the average, or two thousand four hundred hours a year. Thus we have a clear loss of six thousand three hundred and sixty hours of unproductive feeding and tending. It may be argued, that they are not fed and tended throughout the night, and therefore there is no such loss as the figures displayed by the Highland Society; but they are fed and tended enough to suffice them during the night, for which no compensating work is performed, so that it comes, we think, to nearly the same thing.

According to McCulloch, there are about one million two hundred thousand agricultural horses employed in Great Britain, which, at twenty-five pounds per head for maintenance, amounts to thirty millions sterling per annum for their keep. The unproductive portion, therefore, he finds amounting to the enormous sum of twenty-one millions seven hundred and eighty-five thousand three hundred and six pounds. It will be seen that this estimate is founded on the previous figures displaying the number of hours of feeding and tendence, compared with the number of hours’ work, and the consequent loss of six thousand three hundred and sixty hours. The only compensation for this loss of hours, represented by the above sum of upwards of twenty-one millions sterling, is in the value of the manure, which is thus produced at too great a cost.

“There are insuperable difficulties,” writes the Council of the Highland Society, “attending the employment of vital power; but mechanical power puts forth its energy when called for--it can be regulated, and, at pleasure, stopped. If it is desired to occupy the entire hours of daylight--to extend the field of operations--to work up more raw material--the energy of the animal ceases after a time; but not so that of the machine. The longest hours of summer may be advantageously employed.” And why not in the shortest nights of winter also? Could not steam-ploughs be made to carry their own lights with Hale Thomson’s patent silvered-glass reflectors, like other locomotives?

The next sentence brings us full-butt against the corner-stone of our social edifice, and moots the question as to the effect of machinery in increasing the demand for human labour:--“Were the whole period of daylight industriously employed in the most effective manner--that is, by the employment of machinery--the demand for human labour would be augmented in the exact ratio of the increased time, multiplied by the augmented force of the machinery.”

“Be fruitful and multiply,” said the God of Nature;--“You must be starved, if you do!” say the beldame economists. Meantime, an immense proportion of the habitable and fertile earth lies quite uncultivated, the vast seas are full of prolific food, and the land which is cultivated, is not made the most of. The art of tilling has not kept pace with other improvements. Before the wonders of steam appeared in the world there was occasionally a random attempt to introduce some improvement in tillage, but the experiments originated in a wish rather than in any definite plan, and were of course a failure and an absurdity. Dean Swift brought his pungent satire to bear upon these attempts, in his account of the grand Academy of Lagado, Mr. Lemuel Gulliver says he was highly pleased with a projector who had discovered a plan for turning up the ground with hogs, to save the charge of ploughs, cattle, and labour. The method was beautifully simple. In a given field you bury at six inches distance, and eight inches deep, a quantity of acorns in long rows. You then drive six hundred hogs into the field, who, in search of the food they most love, will root or plough up the whole into furrows, with their snouts. The absurdities committed soon led to a cessation of all mere experiments, until at length came steam-engines, and thence, in due course, the dream of a steam-plough. This dream we are peradventure about to see realised in a few months; and then, though our million of agricultural horses will be diminished, our fine breed of Yorkshire and Lancashire ploughmen will not be thinned; any more than spinning and weaving machinery exterminated--as was awfully predicted it would--our army of spinners and weavers.

“I was bred to the plough,” said Robert Burns, when addressing a letter to the wealthy gentlemen of the Ayrshire Hunt:--“I am independent;” but it may turn out that the plough of old will soon be a sorry thing to depend upon. We are rather reminded of the Prologue to Chaucer’s “Ploughman Tale,” though he could have had no anticipation that his cessation from this labour would be final.

“The Ploughman pluckéd up his plough, When Midsomer moon was comen in, And saied his beasts should eat ynowe, And lye in the grasse up to the chin. He shook off shere, and coulter off drowe, And hongéd his harnis on a pin.”

“Our strongest hope for the improvement of our social condition,” says Miss Martineau, “lies in the directing of intelligence full upon the cultivation of the soil.” The more the powers of science are brought to bear upon the tillage of the earth, and the production and manufacture of food, the greater will be the number benefited, and the more speedily will Miss Martineau’s axiom be verified. Cordially coinciding with that lady, we wish all success to the important undertaking of Lord Willoughby de Eresby, and shall be glad to find he accomplishes and establishes what has hitherto been confined to experimental trials.

A SACRED GROVE.

Here Silence is the queen of time; her hand Is raised--and the tide trembles to a pause. Beauty, too awful to be loved, awakes And spell-binds Man’s repose. The sunken sun, Whose mantle’s gold is melted in the tint Of evening’s purple sadness, near the west Lingers awhile, as loth to quit the scene. Yet ’tis not sadness all; for though the trees, Heavy with cumbrous melancholy, sweep Their sombre-foliaged boughs close to the grass, And solemn twilight peers between the trunks, Tinging the dome of yonder vacant fane-- O’er all a spirit of subdued emotion Breathes in pathetic sweetness, deep diffused.

In this dim palace of grey Solitude, Where not a sigh wafts o’er the lily’s urn, And nought, save marble forms of tenderest grace, With pensive attitude stand in lone bowers-- The heart, upheaving into the fresh air, Itself abandons to the scene, and claims Kindred with placid Death, and those lost hopes That lived around the loved ones, now no more. Their tombs smile pale beneath these cypress boughs, Heavy with memory of all the past.

Moveless I stand before these moveless trees-- Breathless as those broad boughs; and gazing thus, At the dark foliage imaged in the pools, Which deepen, as the brooding mind surveys Their trance and awful beauty; ’tis a scene That lures us backward to an elder time, Through ages dim--and, thence, into a realm Whose secret influence fills us with its soul-- Shadows of things which are not of the world, And hopes that burn, yet find no vent save tears.

“CAPE” SKETCHES.

Cape Wants are neither peculiar nor numerous. Captain Smoke, in Jerrold’s comedy of “Bubbles of the Day,” confides to his friend, Lord Skindeep, that he is “terribly in want of a thousand pounds.” The reply is “You may take it as a general rule, Captain Smoke, that every man wants a thousand pounds.” As with men so with Colonies. The sun never sets upon one of the dependencies of Great Britain, young or old, which would not be the better for a thousand pounds. Our Colonies feel, however, another want;--it is for something to which the Smokes of the old country show a very marked aversion; and that is labour. “Capital and labour!” is a cry which reaches us from every quarter of the earth. The demand does not resound so loudly perhaps from the Cape as from other and newer Colonies; but the want of the first necessities of enterprise, civilisation, and progress is not the less felt. Any sort of European labour (except convict labour), any kind of capital, is welcome in our South African dependencies; and in the long run “pays.”