FARMING AS AN ART

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 667, 18 April 1952, Page 13

FARMING AS AN ART

GREAT FARMERS, by James A. Scott Watson and May Elliott Hobbs; Faber and Faber. English price, 21/-. AGRICULTURE, the oldest of the arts, has had recorders of its history and its romance since the times of the Romans, If most ‘of the early story is lost, a good deal of the development of the last 200 years, in Britain at least, has been put on record in the journals of observant travellers, or preserved in- scientific papers, or rescued by the student of history from obscure sources. The title of the book under notice, which is a revised and enlarged edition of one first published in 1937 suggests a series of portraits of men who have left their impress on British farming, and indeed one would have welcomed such a volume. What in fact we have is a history of the art of farm-

ling in the last 150 years and of many of the services contributing thereto, told in the main through the doings of the leaders. It is on farming as an art and on farmers that the emphasis is chiefly laid. The chapter on Science and the Land gets only a dozen pages, and in them most space is given to men whose work was done last century. On the other hand, the organisations created by the farmers or that have grown up to meet their needs get more than 80 pages: a chapter on The Great Societies, with some account of agricultural education, one on the agricultural press, and one on Great Salesmen, in which the services to studbreeders of men such as John Thornton, the auctioneer (once called a "herdbook in trousers"), get appreciative notice. The story of the improvement of breeds of livestock that has made Britain the stud-farm of the wogld is adequately told in terms of the improvers and of animals such as Comet and the Duchesses, whose names are household words among breeders equally with those of Bates, Booth, Webb and the Cruickshanks. There is a sufficient index and some

excellent plates.

L. J.

Wild