rd Carrington, under
whose presidency the board offered premiums (the first of L200), owing
to the high price of wheat and consequent distress, for essays on the
best means of converting certain portions of grass land into tillage
without exhausting the soil, and of returning the same to grass, after
a certain period, in an improved state, or at least without injury.
The general report, based on the information derived from these
essays, states that no high price of corn or temporary distress would
justify the ploughing up of old meadows or rich pastures, and that on
certain soils well adapted to grass age improves the quality of the
pasture to a degree which no system of management on lands broken up
and laid down can equal. In spite of this, the cupidity of landowners
and farmers, when wheat was a guinea a bushel or at prices near it,
led to the ploughing up of much splendid grass land, which was never
laid down again until, perhaps in recent years, owing to the low price
of grain; so that some of the land at all events has, owing to bad
times, returned to the state best suited to it.

The board looked upon the enclosure and cultivation of waste lands,
which in England they estimated at 6,000,000 acres,[508] as a panacea
for the prevailing distress, and after much opposition they managed to
pass through both Houses in 1801 a Bill cheapening and facilitating
the process of parliamentary enclosure. This Act, 41 Geo. III, c. 109,
'extracted a number of clauses from various private Acts and enacted
that they should hold good in all cases where the special Act did not
expressly provide to the contrary.' Another benefit rendered to
agriculture was the establishment in 1803 of lectures on agricultural
chemistry, the first lecturer engaged being Mr., afterwards Sir
Humphry, Davy, who may be regarded as the father of agricultural
chemistry.

In 1806 Sinclair was re-elected president, and his second term was
mainly devoted to completing the agricultural surveys of the different
counties, which, before his retirement in 1813, he had with one or two
exceptions the satisfaction of seeing finished. Though over-impetuous,
he rendered valuable service to agriculture, not only by his own
energy but by stirring up energy in others; as William Wilberforce the
philanthrophist said, 'I have myself seen collected in that small room
several of the noblemen and gentlemen of the greatest properties in
the British Isles, all of them catching