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BACKWARDNESS OF FARMING.

35

intercourse than those of Kent and Normandy. After the Rebellion a number of noblemen and gentlemen amused themselves with farming in the English style. The late Lord Eglinton spared no expense in getting English servants. He showed his countrymen what might be done by high cultivation. Mr. Drummond, of Blair, sent over one of his ploughmen to learn drill husbandry, and the culture of turnips from Lord Eglinton's English servants. The very next year he raised a field of turnips, which were the first in the country. And they were as neatly dressed as any in Hertfordshire. A single horse ploughing the drills astonished the country people, who, till then, had never seen fewer than four yoked. About the year 1771 our tenants were well-disposed to the culture of turnips. They begin to have an idea of property in winter as well as in summer; nor is it any longer thought bad neighbourhood to drive off cattle that are trespassing upon their winter crops."[1]

The young Laird of Col, just before Johnson's visit, had gone to Hertfordshire to study farming, and had brought back "the culture of turnips. His intention is to provide food for his cattle in the winter. This innovation was considered by Mr. Macsweyn as the idle project of a young head heated with English fancies; but he has now found that turnips will grow, and that hungry sheep and cows will really eat them."[2] Yet progress was not so rapid but that Adam Smith held that a better system could only be introduced "by a long course of frugality and industry; half a century or a century more perhaps must pass away before the old system which is wearing out gradually can be completely abolished."[3]

The cultivation of vegetables for the table and of fruits was also taking a start, though much remained to be done. When Johnson was informed at Aberdeen that Cromwell's soldiers had taught the Scotch to raise cabbages, he remarked, that "in the passage through villages it seems to him that surveys their gardens, that when they had not cabbage they had nothing."[4] Pennant, however, the year before, in riding from Arbroath to Montrose, had passed by "extensive fields of potatoes—a novelty till within the last twenty years."[5] It was not till Johnson had travelled beyond Elgin that he saw houses with fruit trees about them. "The improvements of the Scotch," he remarks, "are for immediate profit; they do not yet think it quite worth their while to plant what will not produce something to be eaten or sold in a very little time."[6] The Scotch historian of Edinburgh complained that "the apples which were brought to market from the neighbourhood were unfit for the table."[7] "Good apples are not to be seen," wrote Topham in his Letters

  1. ↑ Scotland and Scotchmen of the Eighteenth Century, ii. 212, 227, 228, 231, 272, 277.
  2. ↑ Johnson's Works, ix. 121.
  3. ↑ Wealth of Nations, i. 309.
  4. ↑ Piozzi Letters, i. 116.
  5. ↑ Pennant's Tour in Scotland, ii. 138.
  6. ↑ Piozzi Letters, i. 121.
  7. ↑ Arnot's History of Edinburgh, p. 347.
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