How would the _Scriptores Rei Rusticæ_ have gained in usefulness in their own time, how immensely in interest in ours, had they been accompanied by such illustrations as these! The clearness of Columella would have been made more transparent, the obscurity of Palladius lessened; and Cato and Varro would have preserved to us the actual living forms, and costumes, and instruments of the ancient Etruscan times, more clearly than the painted tombs are now revealing to the antiquarian the fashions of their feasts, and games, and funereal rites. We have before us the singularly, richly, and extravagantly, yet graphically and most instructively illustrated book of Georgius Agricola, _De Re Metallica_ (Basil, 1621.) The woodcuts of the _Book of the Farm_ have induced us to turn it up, and it is with ever new admiration that we turn over its old leaves. It has to us the interest of a child's picture-book; and though, as a _chef-d'oeuvre_ of illustrative art, the three hundred woodcuts of Stephens do not approach the book of Agricola, yet what a treasure would the work of Ausonius Popma on the rural implements of the ancients--their _instrumenta_ in its widest sense--have been to us, could it have been illustrated when he wrote (1690) in the style of Agricola, and with the minuteness and fulness of Stephens! The same desire to render minutely intelligible the whole subject treated of, which these woodcuts show, is manifested in the more solid letterpress of the book. It was said of Columella, by Matthew Gessner, that he discoursed "non ut argumentum simplex quod discere amat, dicendo obscuret, sed ut clarissimâ luce perfundat omnia." Such, the reader feels, must have been the aim of the author of this book. In his descriptions, nothing appears to be omitted; nothing is too minute to be passed over. His book exposes not merely the every-day life, but the very inmost life--the habits, and usages, and instruments of the most humble as well as the most important of the operations of the domestic, equally with the field economy of rural life. We do not know if its effects upon our town population will ever be such as Beza ascribes to that of Columella-- Tu vero, Juni, silvestria rura canendo, Post te ipsas urbes in tua rura trahis; but certainly, with a few more woodcuts, it would, in minute and graphic illustration, by prints and letterpress be a most worthy companion to the work of Agricola. The plan of the book is to give a history of the agricultural year, after the manner of the Roman Palladius and our own old Tucker; and the present volume embraces the operations of the skilful farmer in every kind of husbandry during the winter and spring. But, before we come to the heart of the book, hear what Mr Stephens says about the agricultural learning of our landed gentry:--