“Some men will tell you that a plough cannot work eight score or nine score acres yearly, but I will show you that it can.  You know well that a furlong ought to be forty perches long and four wide, and the King’s perch is sixteen feet and a half:  then an acre is sixty-six feet in width.  Now in ploughing go thirty-six times round to make the ridge narrower, and when the acre is ploughed then you have made seventy-two furlongs, which are six leagues, for be it known that twelve furlongs are a league.  And the horse or ox must be very poor that cannot from the morning go easily in pace three leagues in length from his starting place and return by three o’clock.  And I will show you by another reason that it can do as much.  You know that there are in the year fifty-two weeks.  Now take away eight weeks for holy days and other hindrances, then are there forty-four working weeks left.  And in all that time the plough shall only have to plough for fallow or for 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.]