RITCHIE, Robert.

8vo, pp. xvi, 272, and 23 lithographed plates (including 2 extending) from drawings by the author, + 8 pages of Blackie’s adverts at the end. Half-title, numerous illustrations in the text (1 full-page). Last two plates a little browned and spotted and with dampstain in two margins. Original green blind-stamped cloth (a little marked and rubbed), yellow endpapers. Early signature of ‘Bolton’ at top of title-page, bookplate of the Royal Institution of Cornwall.

FIRST EDITION. An early work on the application of steam power to farm machinery. The first quarter of the book is on the history of threshing and the various early threshing machines, described by Marshall (Landed Property, 1804, pp. 163–4) as “the most valuable discovery, in machines of agriculture, which has been made for centuries past” as threshing by hand was hard, dirty, slow and inefficient work. Ritchie, a civil engineer, devotes the greater part of this book and most of the plates to the application of steam power to threshing. He notes that “a very serviceable high pressure portable steam engine …has recently been introduced at one or two farms near Edinburgh” (p. 272). The first portable steam thresher had been made eight years previously.