The Note-Book. NOTES FROM OLD BOOKS, &c. 1.—Palissy, the Potter. Contributed by R. W. BLENCOWE, Esq., The Hooke, Lewes, Sussex. In our search after those who in former days have written down their thoughts and the results of their experience upon subjects connected with agriculture, it is impossible to pass over one of the most remarkable men of his own or indeed of any ageBernard Palissy, the potter. It would be foreign to our purpose to speak at length of those extraordinary works of his in pottery, in which, with that truthfulness which was a remarkable feature in his moral character, he imitated to the life those objects of nature which it was his great delight to observe: snakes and lizards, lobsters and shell-fish, fishes, seaweed, ferns, and creeping things innumerable, which when sold in the present day command such high prices as place them only in the collections of the rich. Neither shall we dilate upon his piety, his resolution, his bold defiance of every danger in seeking after and adhering to religious truth, which in the time of the persecution of the Huguenots would have brought him to the stake, if his great artistic skill, which made him almost a necessity to his great and powerful employers, had not saved him from that fate; and this failed at last to preserve him from that imprisonment in the Bastile where he passed the last four years of a glorious life. It is our business to consider him in the character of a geologist and a thorough lover of agriculture. Born in the condition of a peasant in the very early part of the 16th century, in an obscure provincial town in the South of France, he wandered about among the plains and rocks and woods in the neighbourhood of his native place, and employed his eyes to observe, as our own Hugh Miller-a kindred spirit to his own-in our own day has done; and he directed his naturally sagacious mind to reflect upon what he saw, and thus he was enabled to pry into many of the secrets of nature, and to anticipate many of the discoveries of later times, which he announced to the world, and . was laughed at as a dreamer of idle dreams. To those who little value the efforts now made to instruct the farmer and the husbandman in the principles of the noble science in which they are engaged, we would commend to their notice the following passage in his work, published about S the middle of the 16th century, entitled, 'How to grow Rich in Farming.' It is carried on in the way of dialogue, and, to a fancied objector to his theories, he says : ... . "I see so much error and ignorance in all the arts, that it seems to me as if all order were for the greater part perverted, and that each labours on the soil without any philosophy, and that all jog jog onwards. at the accustomed trot, following the footsteps of their predecessors, without considering the nature or the prime causes of agriculture. There is no art in the world in which a greater philosophy is required than agriculture; and when agriculture is conducted without philosophy it is the same thing as a daily violation of the earth and of the things which she produces.... I dare well affirm too that, if the earth were cultivated as it ought to be, one day would produce the fruit which two give in the way that it is now cultivated daily... When you walk through the villages, consider a little the muck-heaps of the labourers [the word labourer is not used by him in the same sense as it is at present, but means a husbandman generally], and you will see that they put them outside their stables, now on a high place, now on a low place, without any consideration, but, if the heap be piled up, it suffices them; and then take notice in a time of rain, and you will see that the waters which fall on the said muck-heaps carry away a black tint in passing through them, which is the chief part and whole sum of the substance of the muck-heap. you not see, then, a manifest ignorance which is greatly to be regretted. Note," he says, "that there is no produce of the soil, whether good or bad, that does not contain in itself some kind of salt; and when the straw, the hay, and other herbs are putrefied, the waters which pass through them carry away the salt which was within them; and just as you see that a salt haddock would at last lose all its salsitive substance, and at length have no taste at all, in like manner you must believe that the muck-heaps lose their salt when they are washed by the rains." .. Do • .. To the question, How can I keep my manure from spoiling? his directions are as clear and sensible as any of the receipts published in our agricultural journals at the present day, and, in fact, he has anticipated several of them. "If you wish," he says, " to have the full and complete service of your manure, you must hollow a pit in some convenient place near to your stables, and this pit having been dug in the shape of a pool or of a watering-pond, it is necessary that you pave it with flints, or stones, or brick, and this having been well plastered with mortar made of lime and sand, you will take your manure there, to be kept until it be necessary to take it to the fields. And in order that the said manure be not spoilt by the rains nor by the sun, you will make some kind of hut to cover it, and when the seedtime shall arrive you will carry it into the field, with all its substance, and you will find that the pavement of the pit will have preserved all the liquid part of the manure, which otherwise would have been lost, and the earth would have absorbed part of the substance of it. I assure you that it is the best of the manure, because containing the most salt; and if you thus will render back to the earth the same thing which had been taken from it by the growth of seeds, the seed which you put into the ground afterwards will take up again the same thing that you will have carried thither." ... How would he have rejoiced in our noble institution, a showyard of implements ! " I could wish," he exclaims, "that the king had founded certain offices, estates, and honours for all those who should invent some good and subtle agricultural tool. If it were so, everybody's mind would have been bent on town, but there were found a few; and precisely as you see men despise the ancient modes of dress, they would despise also the ancient implements of agriculture, and in good sooth they would invent better ones. "Armourers often change the fashion of the halberds, swords, and other harness, but the ignorance in agriculture is so great that it abides ever accustomed to one method, and if the tools were clumsy at their first invention, they preserve them ever in their clumsiness: in one province, one accustomed fashion without any change; in another province, another also without ever changing. "It is not long since I was in the province of Bearn and of Bigorre, but in passing through the fields I could not look at the labourers without chafing within myself, seeing the clumsiness of their implements. And why is it that we find no well-born youth who studies as much to invent tools useful to his labourers as he takes pains over the cutting of his coat into surprising patterns? I cannot contain myself to talk over these things, considering the folly and ignorance of men." He thoroughly comprehended, when no one else did, the true theory of rain : "You must believe firmly," he says, "that all the waters that are, shall be, and have been, were created in the beginning of the world; and God, wishing to leave nothing in idleness, commands them to go to and fro, and be productive. This they do without ceasing, and in like manner the rain-water that falls in winter remounts in summer to return again in winter. The heating of the sun and the dryness of the winds striking against the earth raises a large quantity of water, which being collected in the air, and formed into clouds, are sent out to all the corners of heaven, as the heralds of the Lord; and when it is God's pleasure that the clouds, which are nothing more than stores of water, shall dissolve, the said vapours are converted into rains which fall upon the earth." Nor has the theory of springs of water ever been more clearly and simply demonstrated than in the following passage : "Having taken this into your consideration," he had been speaking of the hardness of rocks, -" and into your memory, you can understand the reason why more springs and rivers proceed from the mountains than from the remainder of the earth, which is no other thing than that the rocks and mountains retain the water from the rains, as they might be held in a brazen vessel. And the waters falling over the earths and clefts always descend, and are not stopped until they have found some spot grounded with stone or rock condensed, and then they rest upon that bottom; till having found some channel or other opening, they press out in fountains, brooks, or rivers." It is said that Artesian wells were first bored in Artois long before the time of Palissy, whilst others dispute the fact. Certain, however, it is, from the following passage in his Treatise upon Marl, that he had fully ascertained the true principle of These are some of the discoveries of a man made 300 years ago, and who, as he says of himself, "had no other book than the heavens and the earth, which are known of all men, and given to all men to be known and read." * them : "I think," he says, "the soil might be pierced easily by rods, and by such means one might easily discover marl, and even well waters, which might often rise above the spot at which the point of the augur found them; and that could take place provided they came from a place higher than the bottom of the hole that you had made." 2.-The Western Counties. By R. W. BLENCOWE, Esq. In the last volume of this Journal we gave as a proof of the great wealth and importance of the county of Somerset in early times, the fact, that when a tax under the name of a benevolence was levied in 1547 on all the counties of England, the highest sum, amounting to 7000l., was paid by that county; then came Kent and Essex, and Devonshire ranked as the fourth in the amount of its contribution. We have another curious proof leading to the same conclusion, which occurred a hundred years later. Some of our readers may not be aware that about the middle of the seventeenth century it was a common custom in towns where any number of workmen were employed in manufactories, to coin and issue a low denomination of copper money-pennies, halfpennies, and farthings for the payment of the workmen and the poor; and these were called Town Tokens. At the time we speak of, between the years 1648 and 1672, there were 87 towns in England where the tokens were coined. It is a remarkable proof of the activity of trade in the county of Somerset, that there were no less than 13 towns within it which issued this currency; the next largest number was in Dorsetshire, where there were 8; then came Devonshire, where there were 5; 4 in Hampshire, and only 1 in Kent; and, what is very remarkable, not one in the whole of Yorkshire. The token of the town of Minehead bears as its device a woolpack, and on the reverse a ship, the usual symbol of a seaport-town; and the inscription declares it to be "the poor's farthing of Minehead." That of Taunton is a rebus, the letter T passed through a tun. Cross swords and a leg was the device of Ilminster, and a flower-pot that of Axminster, the origin of which last two symbols has never been explained. One of the best and most interesting memorials of the manufacturing greatness of other days is the Lane Aisle, as it is called, in the church of Collumpton. It is beautiful in itself, particularly in its ceiling, and on the outer walls its founder has with honest pride indicated the source of his wealth in the sculptured implements of his trade as a wool stapler, and in the ships which symbolize his extensive commerce with foreign countries. This great commercial activity has passed away from the West of England, and the mighty energies of our country are now displayed in the Midland and Northern Counties; but not so the pride and delight with which the inhabitants of the Western districts, particularly those of Devonshire, regard their native counties, a feature in their character which was alluded to and explained by a writer upon the agriculture of the West of England sixty years ago. Speaking of this change, he says: * See Morley's very interesting Life of Palissy, the Potter.' "Through a series of subsequent circumstances, which it would not be difficult to trace, the inhabitants of the body of the Island have long since gained the lead in what relates to the useful arts and modern improvements; a fact of which the mere provincialists of this western extremity of it do not appear to be yet sufficiently apprised, or, somewhat unfortunately for their country, cannot yet allow themselves to acknowledge. " I endeavour to place this circumstance in what appears to me its just light, the rather as it has tended more than any other, perhaps, to prevent the country from profiting by modern discoveries. Indeed, of late years, the spirit of improvement has not slumbered more composedly in the Highlands of Scotland than it has in this part of England; and with respect to civilization and moral conduct among the lower classes of society, the Highlanders are very superior to the miners and mountaineers of Cornwall and Devonshire: a spirit of riot and outrage may be said to distinguish them from the other inhabitants of the island." If this be a just account of the people of Cornwall and Devon sixty years ago, which may well be doubted, all we can say is, that a thorough change in their character has long since taken place. "The natives of Devonshire," he adds, " are mostly of good person, tall, straight, and well-featured: many of the women are of elegant figure. In the habitudes and manners of the middle-class we find little which marks the inhabitants of this western extremity of the island from those of the more central part of it, except such provincial distinguishments as are observable in almost every district, excepting what arises from an over-rated estimate of themselves. This endemial habitude, which is not obvious to strangers only, but which the gentlemen of the county who mix with the world are the first to remark, may perhaps be accounted for without bringing any violent charge of personal vanity or want of natural sagacity against the present inhabitants. "The coast of the English Channel, especially its more western part, was in much probability the first part of the island which was resorted to by civilized foreigners, and its inhabitants, of course, took the lead in the early stages of civilization in England, and were far advanced perhaps in urbanity and useful knowledge; while the inhabitants of the more central and northern districts remained in a state of barbarity and ignorance. Hence in reality they not only felt, but really possessed a well-grounded superiority." This certainly was the case. Cæsar describes the inhabitants of Kent as being by far the most civilized of the Britons, and so they were of those with whom he came into contact. But Diodorus Siculus, speaking of Cornwall some 300 years earlier than Cæsar did of Kent, and particularly of the inhabitants of that part of it near the Land's End, says: "They who dwell near the promontory of Britain, which is called Belerium (the Land's End), are singularly fond of strangers, and from their intercourse with foreign merchants are civilized in their habits. These people obtain the |