I had this year a severe fever, which occasioned several of my friends, with all the acrimony that a departure from the usual modes of life occasions, strongly to dissuade me from persisting in my scheme. I myself was firmly persuaded that it was not, as they declared, the cause of my illness, and therefore when I was perfectly recovered resumed the practice, which I continued for many years; and I once at Petworth, at Lord Egremont’s, went into the bath at four in the morning, when the thermometer was below zero. Upon coming out, walked into the shrubbery, and rolled myself in the snow as an experiment to see the effect on my body; it had none, except that of increasing strength and activity, and was not at all disagreeable. In January commenced one of the greatest speculations in my life—the publication of ‘The Annals of Agriculture.’ I had long meditated such a work, and corresponded upon it with Mr. Whyman Baker, of Ireland, who had promised communications. The plan which first suggested itself was peculiar, and to the exclusion of all private profit—with a constant publication of the printing and publishing accounts—but the booksellers applied to, rejected the idea, and the work appeared monthly, with very indifferent success, for about a twelvemonth. The correspondence being highly respectable, and no papers inserted without the name and place of abode of the writer, it rose gradually to the support of itself, and after a time enabled me to insert a great number of plates. It would have proved a very profitable publication but for the many numbers which were obliged to be reprinted. Printing only 500 afterwards occasioned reprinting another 500, still a third 500. This created so large an expense that it swallowed up everything that wore the resemblance of profit, and many years afterwards I continued reprinting various numbers for the sole object of completing sets; this formed a back current; which carried away what would have been profit. It may be added that many of those papers written by myself, forming perhaps a third or fourth of the whole work, may be reckoned among my most valuable productions, and have received the sanction of approbation, by being translated into several foreign languages. It is an anecdote which cannot be generally known, that two very able letters, which came under the name of Robinson, the King’s shepherd at Windsor, were really the production of his Majesty’s own pen, describing what he had long been intimately acquainted with, the husbandry of Mr. Ducket. The King took in two sets of the work, one of which he regularly sent to that farmer; and in the interview which I had with his Majesty upon the terrace of Windsor, the first word the King said to me was: ‘Mr. Y., I consider myself as more obliged to you than to any other man in my dominions,’ and the Queen told me that they never travelled without my ‘Annals’ in the carriage. Lord Fife informed me that he himself always had the