“These engines,” says a writer in the Mechanics’ Magazine, “possess great advantages in being applicable to thrashing, and other agricultural purposes, and can be moved from farm to farm, and from field to field, with the greatest facility.” No doubt of it. We see what will soon happen. Thrashing, and _many other_ agricultural purposes! The great farmers, once in possession of the talisman of a steam-plough, will never rest till they make it applicable to all sorts of operations. Already almost every farmer in Scotland is provided with a stationary steam-engine; a locomotive that can turn--not its hands--but its wheels to anything, is now his only other thing needful. In the specification of the very first of these ploughs--Etzler’s Iron Slave--it is distinctly stated that, although the machine is intended for ploughing, yet the Slave will be ready at all times to devote his energies and skill to “sowing, and reaping; and also to making canals, roads, tunnels,” &c. Exactly so! After we have ploughed, sowed, reaped, and thrashed by steam, we shall soon find turnips hoed, carrots drawn, beans plucked up, dried, carted, and stacked; sheep sheared, cows milked, butter churned, cheese pressed, pigs transformed into pork, and pork into gammons, by the same omnipotent agency. Hatching eggs by steam is already an old story. A patent for a new steam-plough was taken out in January of the present year by Mr. James Usher of Edinburgh; and another in June, by Messrs. Calloway and Purkiss. The peculiarity of the former consists in mounting “a series of ploughs in the same plane round an axis, so that the ploughs shall successively come into action;” and secondly, in applying power to give a rotary motion to the series, “so that the resistance of the earth to the ploughs, as they enter and travel through the earth, shall _cause the machine_ to be _propelled_”--instead of motion being communicated to the machine from the wheels which run on the land. The other invention--that of Messrs. Calloway and Purkiss--mainly consists of a number of chains working round a wheel, and fitted on the outside with ploughshares. Rotary motion is communicated by a locomotive. “I consider,” says Sir Abel Handy, in the comedy of Speed the Plough, “that a healthy young man between the handles of a plough, is one of the noblest illustrations of the prosperity of Britain.” But shortly after saying this, Sir Abel invents a splendid curricle plough drawn by high-bred Leicestershire horses; who set off at full gallop with the plough at their heels over hill and dale, and instead of doing the allotted work a-field, they rush about at random, ploughing up Salisbury Plain. What would Sir Abel have said to Sir Willoughby de Eresby’s snorting steam-horse, perfectly under control?