'The Landscape and the Machine': A Comment.

The article comments on the paper "The Landscape and the Machine: Technical Interrelatedness, Land Tenure and the Mechanization of the Corn Harvest in Victorian Britain," by Paul A. David, that appeared in the book "Essays on a Mature Economy: Britain After 1840," edited by Donald N. McCloskey. David contends that the slowness with which mechanical reapers were adopted by British farmers is to be explained by physical features of the farm landscape in Britain which made their adoption relatively unattractive. David's evidence for the index of the harvest differential turns out on inspection to be based on rates of pay of women workers on one farm in Northumberland. Whether this is an adequate basis for estimating the movement of the differential for (predominantly) male workers in all the corn-growing regions of England, might be questioned. Given that the critical factors determining the profitability of mechanization-cum-improvement were the incremental cereal yield and the cost of improvement, it is proper to ask whether any doubt attaches to the values David posits for the other parameters and variables composing these expressions.