Har′row.
（
Husbandry.) The harrow is a large rake, being a frame with teeth drawn over the ground to level it, stir the soil, destroy weeds, or cover seed.
It is a frame, usually of wood, and has downwardly projecting teeth which penetrate the soil.
The shapes of the frame are various.
The teeth are usually of square
bar-iron, sharpened to a point, maintaining the square form.
They are set in the harrow-frame so as to move in a direction parallel to their diagonals.
As stated under the appropriate heading, the cultivator is an improved harrow; handles being added to increase its manageability; and colters or shares substituted for straight teeth, thus increasing its efficiency.
Harrows are made with the various modifications mentioned, and others might be cited, but still they are called harrows by their makers, setting classification at defiance.
These hybrids are useful and efficient tools, many of them, but it is not easy to give them a “local habitation” or “a name” in a classified digest of machines.
Two notices of the harrow are found in the
Bible.
In Job is the inquiry, “Will he [the unicorn] harrow the valleys after thee?”
The word is said by some Hebraists to be a mis-
[
1067]
nomer; a seed-covering tool is referred to, drawn by animal power, and may have been a plow.
Their thrashing drag would have made a tolerable harrow.
It was a frame of boards, studded with spikes.
See thrashing.
The other reference to the harrow occurs in the account of the cruelty practiced by David upon the men of Rabbah, 1033 B. C.: “He cut them with
saws, and with
harrows of iron, and with
axes.”
（1 Chron. XX. 3.) The parallel passage in 2 Samuel XII. 31 states that “he put them under saws and harrows,” etc.
Adam Clarke disputes the rendering, and declares that the original means he made slaves of them, putting them to work with saws, harrows, and axes.
Quien sabe.
 |
|
Harrows. |
Although the images of
Osiris are represented with a plow in each hand (
a,
Fig. 2412), and something like a harrow hanging by a cord over the left shoulder, still the harrow does not appear to have been in ordinary use in ancient
Egypt.
In the elaborate sepulchral paintings, the various operations of husbandry are carefully depicted, and these show that the clods were broken by hoes, and the seed was covered by hoes, plows, the tramping of men or animals, and perhaps by dragging bushes over the surface.
Being sown on the mud left by the retiring
Nile, the seed needed little attention and soon germinated.
The amount of mud left by the
Nile raises the cultivated land about six inches in a century at Elephanta.
An inscription of the age of the Emperor Antoninus on the pedestal of the vocal
Memnon shows that the soil at
Thebes has risen seven feet in 1,700 years, say five inches to the century.
An excavation at the foot of one of the colossal sphinxes at
Karnak shows a deposit of eighteen feet above the layer of spawls and rubbish forming the foundation.
Beneath this is an alluvial deposit of unknown depth.
The rise of eighteen feet indicates a period of 2,250 years B. C. for the erection of that sphinx.
The elevation of the land by the sediment of the inundation decreases south wardly.
The periodical rise commences about June 1, it increases for three months, remains stationary about twelve days, and then subsides.
The rise is greatest in
Upper Egypt, and less towards the mouth.
Thirty-six feet rise is a “good rise” at
Thebes, twenty-five feet at
Cairo.
The rise at the Damietta and Rosetta mouths may be about four feet. The land is gradually encroaching on the desert in most places; buildings and monuments originally erected on the barren land outside of cultivation have now a depth of many feet of soil around their bases.
Many of the sites of antiquity are now buried.
(See
Wilkinson.) The amount of land inundated by the
Nile is about 5,626 square miles (average). This does not include the river and lakes.
Harrows bore the same part in the operations of husbandry in the time of Pliny (A. D. 79) that they do now. “After the seed is put in the ground, harrows with long teeth are drawn over it.”
The common harrow of the Romans was a hurdle, but they also used harrows made of planks studded with iron spikes.
The harrow is represented in the tapestry of Bayeaux, A. D. 1066, and is mentioned by Googe, in his “Heresbachius,” A. D. 1578.
An act of the
Irish Parliament was passed in 1634, forbidding harnessing horses by the “tayles” to harrows.
See notice under harness, p. 1062.
Harrows are made of various forms, and if we reject the harrow, if such it be, on the shoulder of
Osiris (
a), we may suppose it to have been originally a bundle of bushes (
b) tied together at the butts, and thus dragged over the field.
A log on the brush — as we of the
West term it — would flatten as well as weight it, and would add to its efficiency.
The bush-harrow is very efficient in covering timothy, clover, etc.
Directions for the construction of a harrow are given by an English agricultural writer in 1668, as follows: —
“Get a pretty big white-thorn tree, and make sure that it be wonderful thick, bushy, and rough grown.”
In some parts of the north of
Europe, the spiky limbs of fir-trees are bound together, and the spurs of the limbs make a reasonably fair substitute for the tines of a harrow.
In another form, the bush-harrow
g is used under conditions where the teeth of an ordinary harrow
[
1068]
would penetrate too far, as in covering
grass-seed.
The bushes are cut and so disposed in a frame as to present a moderately level surface of limbs, which, as they pass over the land, reduce inequalities and cover the seed as deep as desirable.
The object, of course, in putting land down to grass is to obtain a good level surface over which to mow.
The thrashing-sled of the Egyptians and Syrians, the tribulum of the Romans, may have been used for dragging over the ground to cover seed, but it does not so appear.
As stated, the harrow in the time of Pliny had long iron teeth.
A convenient limb of a tree has often furnished a ready frame for a harrow,
c, which is attached by a clevis to the double tree of the team or the chain of the oxen.
In still earlier periods it was hauled by a withe, a grape-vine, or a rawhide rope.
From this the step is easy to the letter “A” harrow
d, which is a very familiar form in new countries.
It is very handy in ground from which stumps have not been eradicated.
It is easily lifted by the corner or by the bow.
The usual form of the
British harrow is called the Berwickshire pattern,
e. It consists of two parts joined together by iron rods, having hasps and hooks.
Each part consists of four bars of wood connected by cross-bars mortised through them.
The former of these are made of 2 1/2 by 3 inch scantling, and the latter of 2 by 1 inch stuff.
The bars meet at a certain angle, so that the figure formed is a rhomb, and the teeth are inserted into the bars at equal distances from each other.
This obliquity is such that perpendiculars from each of the teeth, falling upon a line drawn at right angles to the line of the harrow's motion, shall divide the space between each bar into equal parts, so that the lines marked by the teeth in the soil shall be parallel and equidistant.
h is a double-harrow with folding sections.
f f′ is another form of double-harrow consisting of a triangular frame to which the team is hitched, and a square frame hinged to the former, so as to be brought into effective position or be laid over the other when not required.
The rear portion has handles, and its teeth split the balks between the furrows left by the teeth of the preceding harrow.
f is a top view,
f′ a side view.
 |
|
Rotary-harrow. |
Double-harrows are made in many other forms, two, three, or four leaved, and having sections square, lozenge, trapezoidal, rhomboidal, or triangular.
Specimens of each would be given did space permit.
The harrow
i is for grassy or weedy lands, and has teeth of cultivator form, presenting V-shaped blades which cut at a distance below the surface, say two or three inches. This in many cases is much more effectual than the mere jagged tearing action of simple spikes.
Another kind of harrow is drawn in the rear of and partly suspended from an axle and pair of wheels.
This implement has also its proper place in some kinds of soil and modes of tillage.
Rotary harrows are made in many forms, and may have one, two, or more sections which lie flatly upon the ground, as in
Fig. 2413. Each section
D is eccentrically journaled by an upright axis to the frame
C, and as a consequence of the eccentricity the sections rotate as the harrow advances over the ground.
As a greater number of spikes are presented on one side of the axis of rotation than on the other, their hold on the ground is greater, and the lighter side is obliged to rotate forwardly.
 |
|
Spiked-cylinder harrow and Seeder. |
The flexible spiked-chain harrow used in
England is made of wrought-iron links, so shaped and com-
[
1069]
bined as to keep the harrow stretched, while a certain number of the teeth, at regular intervals, have dependent spikes.
The spiked-cylinder harrow, known in
England as the Norwegian harrow, has three sets of rowels placed in gangs upon an iron axle.
It is used for reducing the land to a fine tilth for the reception of seed, which it does to a depth of three or four inches in soil which is in suitable preliminary order.
No amount of drawing spiked tools over a wet clay bed will make friable soil, and the use of this tool, as well as of crushing-rollers, is a thing to be done in the right time and place.
Fig. 2414 shows an American form of this tool, which is intended for sowing fertilizers, grain, and
grass-seed, and harrowing in the same.
A portion of one driving-wheel is broken away in the upper view, in order to expose the internal cog-gear by which the spiked cylinder is rotated, as it does not depend upon its contact with the ground for its rotation.
The feeding devices for seed and fertilizer are driven by chain-band connection with a wheel on the spiked drum.
The spiked cylinder may be raised from the ground by the lever
P, or adjusted as to depth of penetration.
