Now, however, a 110-horse power machine, a monster of titanic power and expert skill, plows a strip thirty feet wide, as fast as a man could comfortably walk, and also does the harrowing and sowing simultaneously. This completes the work of plowing and planting at the rate of 80 to 100 acres in a working day, or under favorable conditions even twelve acres an hour, thus doing the work of forty to fifty teams and men. Yet millions of people in the cities are not yet awake to the fact that we have a new rural civilization! When we think of the thousands of men who have patiently experimented and labored to perfect the plow, many of them now unknown, we must consider the modern planting machine not an individual but a race triumph. Among these innumerable experimenters was no less a man than Thomas Jefferson, gentleman farmer, who gave months and years of study in nature's laboratory to the single problem of perfecting the moldboard of the plow, that it might do the most thorough work with the least unnecessary friction. Likewise the harrow, so simple in our grandfathers' days, has remarkably developed, and we have peg-tooth, spring-tooth, disk, spader and pulverizer harrows, drawn by horses or mules, which follow the plow with a four- to twenty-foot swath. But here again the city mechanic must tip his hat to the prairie farmer who uses twentieth century machinery, for we have now a harrowing machine 100 feet in reach which harrows thirty acres in an hour or a whole section of land in about two days! These astonishing facts are particularly staggering to the small farmer, but they need discourage only the incompetent. They have of course combined small farms into great enterprises, and have driven some slovenly farmers from poor soil. The pace is so fast. But specialized farming and intensive farming have their own successes to-day as well as extensive farming, and it all tends to elevate the whole scale of living and standard of efficiency upon the farms; in short producing a new rural civilization.[18] _Power Machinery on the Modern Farm_ A most interesting chapter in the story of human industry is the evolution of power machinery. Gradually the drudgery of hand labor has been relieved by water power, horse power, steam power, wind power and the modern gasolene and electricity. The giant gang-plow with its 110-horsepower traction engine is a prairie triumph, but it has very little interest for the ordinary farmer on an average farm. Yet even the small farmer finds the gasolene portable engine wonderfully useful and a great labor-saver at slight expense.