or spring or winter sowing three roods and a half daily, and for
second fallowing an acre. Now see if a plough were properly kept and
followed, if it could not do as much daily."]

[Footnote 78: Stolo is quibbling. Cato's unit of 240 jugera was based
on the duodecimal system of weights and measures which the Romans had
originally derived from Babylon but afterwards modified by the use
of a decimal system. The enlightened and progressive nations of the
modern world who have followed the Romans in adopting a decimal system
may perhaps approve Stolo's remarks, but it behooves those of us who
still cling to the duodecimal system to defend Cato, if only to keep
up our own courage.]

[Footnote 79: Here, in a few words, is the whole doctrine of
intelligent agriculture. Cf. Donaldson's _Agricultural Biography,
tit_. Jethro Tull. "The name of Tull will ever descend to posterity as
one of the greatest luminaries, if not the very greatest benefactor,
that British agriculture has the pride to acknowledge. His example
furnishes the vast advantages of educated men directing their
attention to the cultivation of the soil, as they bring enlightened
minds to bear upon its practice and look at the object in a naked
point of view, being divested of the dogmas and trammels of the craft
with which the practitioners of routine are inexpugnably provided and
entrenched."]

[Footnote 80: Pliny quotes Cato: "What ever can be done by the help
of the ass costs the least money," which is the philosophy of modern
power machinery on the farm, as elsewhere. It is largely a question of
the cost of fuel, as Varro says.]

[Footnote 81: Green manuring is one of the oldest, as it is one of
the best, of agricultural practices. Long before Varro, Theophrastus
(II.P. 9, I) had recorded what the agricultural colleges teach
today--that beans are valuable for this purpose because they rot
readily, and, he adds, in Macedonia and Thessaly it has always been
the custom to turn them under when they bloom.]

[Footnote 82: Although Varro advises the first ploughing in the spring,
the ancients were not unmindful of the advantages of winter ploughing
of stiff and heavy clay. Theophrastus, who died in B.C. 287, advises
it "that the earth may feel the cold." Indeed, he was fully alive to
the reasons urged by the modern professors of agronomy for intensive
cultivation. "For the soil," he says (C.P. III, 25), "often inverted
becomes free, light and clear of weeds, so