CHAPTER V.
THE STUDENT OF AGRICULTURE Washington took great pains to inform himself concerning any subject in which he was interested and hardly was he settled down to serious farming before he was ordering from England "the best System now extant of Agriculture," Shortly afterward he expressed a desire for a book "lately published, done by various hands, but chiefly collected from the papers of Mr.Hale.If this is known to be the best, pray send it, but not if any other is in high esteem." Another time he inquires for a small piece in octavo, "a new system of Agriculture, or a speedy way to grow rich." Among his papers are preserved long and detailed notes laboriously taken from such works as Tull's _Horse-Hoeing Husbandry_, Duhamel's _A Practical Treatise of Husbandry, The Farmer's Compleat Guide,_ Home's _The Gentleman Farmer_, and volumes of Young's _Annals of Agriculture_.
The abstracts from the _Annals_ were taken after the Revolution and probably before he became President, for the first volume did not appear until 1784.

From the handwriting it is evident that the digests of Tull's and Duhamel's books were made before the Revolution and probably about 1760.

In the midst of the notes on chapter eight of the _Compleat Guide_ there are evidences of a long hiatus in time--Mr.Fitzpatrick of the manuscript division of the Library of Congress thinks perhaps as much as eight or ten years.

A vivid imagination can readily conceive Washington's laying aside the task for the more important one of vindicating the liberties of his countrymen and taking it up again only when he had sheathed the sword.

But all we can say is that for some reason he dropped the work for a considerable time, the evidence being that the later handwriting differs perceptibly from that which precedes it.
As most of Washington's agricultural ideas were drawn from these books, it is worth while for us to examine them.