We should reasonably expect, therefore, that the immense advance made in mechanical science during the last century should have left a deep mark on agricultural appliances. Such an expectation is more than justified; for are there not many among us who have seen the sickle and the flail at work where now the "self-binder" and threshing machine perform the same duties in a fraction of the time formerly required? The ploughman, plodding sturdily down the furrow behind his clever team, is indeed still a common sight; but in the tilling season do we not hear the snort of the steam-engine, as its steel rope tears a six-furrow plough through the mellow earth? When the harvest comes we realise even more clearly how largely machinery has supplanted man; while in the processes of separating the grain from its straw the human element plays an even smaller part. It would not be too much to say that, were we to revert next year to the practices of our grandfathers, we should starve in the year following.
This chapter will be confined to a consideration of machinery operated by horse, steam, or other power, which falls under four main headings,--ploughs, drills, reapers, and threshers.
The firm of Messrs. John Fowler and Company, of Leeds, is most intimately connected with the introduction of the steam plough and cultivator. Their first type of outfit included one engine only, the traversing of the plough across the field being effected by means of cables passing round a pulley on a low, four-wheeled truck, moved along the opposite edge of the field by ropes dragging on an anchor. Another method was to have the engine stationary at one corner of the field, and an anchor at each of the three other corners, the two at the ends of the furrow being moved for every journey of the plough. In, or about, the year 1865 this arrangement succumbed to the simple and, as it now seems to us, obvious improvement of introducing a second engine to progress vis-à-vis with the first, and do its share of the pulling. The modern eight-furrow steam plough will turn ten acres a day quite easily, at a much lower cost than that of horse labour. For tearing up land after a crop "cultivators" are sometimes used. They have arrowhead-shaped coulters, which cut very deep and bring large quantities of fresh earth to the surface.