Anderson, JAMES

Anderson, JAMES, a writer on political economy and agriculture, was born in 1739, at Hermiston, near Edinburgh; and while managing the family farm, he attended chemistry classes. He invented the small two-horse plough without wheels, commonly called the Scotch plough. When only twenty-four years of age, he rented a large farm in Aberdeenshire, where he wrote a series of essays upon agriculture; and in 1780, the university of Aberdeen bestowed on him the degree of LL.D. In Edinburgh he edited (1790-93) a periodical called The Bee; in 1797 he went to London, where he died in 1808. He greatly helped in promoting agriculture in Scotland; and in an essay in his Recreations of Agriculture, he anticipated some important principles subsequently advocated by Malthus and Ricardo, particularly the famous theory of rent.