The Gentleman Farmer. Being an Attempt to improve Agriculture, By subjecting it to the Test of Rational Principles

Three engraved plates. xxvi (i.e. xxiv), 409 pp., one leaf of ads. 8vo, cont. calf (covers a little stained), spine gilt, red morocco lettering piece on spine. Edinburgh: W. Creech & T. Cadell, 1776. First edition. Home (1696-1782), a leading judge in Scotland and the author of several legal and agricultural works, counted James Boswell (who had an affair with Home's daughter Jean), David Hume, Adam Smith, and Benjamin Franklin as friends. In 1766, Home's wife inherited the estate Blair Drummond in Perthshire. "This estate was to provide a focus of Kames's quest for agricultural improvement, setting in train a scheme to clear moss land of its unproductive top layers of moss and peat. His enthusiasm for improvement bore fruit with the publication of a 400-page tome, The Gentleman Farmer, in 1776. This book offered both an attempt to bring together agricultural change and technique into a coherent theoretical system and some very practical observations based on experience about crops, rotations, buildings, and stock. He observed how much progress there had been, and how very different the condition of agriculture in Scotland was from forty years previously, but called for the creation of a board for improving agriculture: centralized direction had benefited the linen industry, and would, in his view, do the same for agriculture."-ODNB. Nice fresh copy. ❧ Fussell, II, pp. 108-10.