First edition of Dymock’s work on the layout of the ideal farm, a fine copy preserving both folding plates illustrating his projected farm, one of the first of its kind, edited and published by Samuel Hartlib.
This book “comments upon Plattes’s suggestion that the uninclosed lands are ‘not now yielding the one-fourth part of that profit either to private or publique.’ It contains two plans, one setting out 2,000 acres into sixteen farms of 100 acres and sixteen farms of 25 acres on a rectangular plan; the other showing the layout of a farm of 300 acres in the form of a circle within a square. It describes experiments of steeping seed in a solution of mixed excreta of animals and birds…Further discussion of manure deals with nitre, and the book also contains An essay upon Master W. Potters Designe; concerning a Bank of Lands…which has a separate title but running pagination.”(Fussell, I, pp. 46-47).
Dymock (fl. 1629-60), “attributed his commitment to agrarian reform to Samuel Hartlib, whom he met about 1648. In the early 1650s he became one of Hartlib’s most loyal admirers, promoting machines for setting corn and grinding, rabbit-farming schemes, and intensive husbandry… He appreciated the weaknesses of contemporary agrarian production and tackled them with mechanical and other innovations. He understood that intensive husbandry involved a planned farming environment.” (ODNB).
