210 FARMERS' INSTITUTES. 



They have given us, too, within the easy memory of many here, the telegraph, 

 photography, the sewing machine, the reaper, the telephone and electric light- 

 ing. How beyond all estimate is the value of these things to us ! How impos- 

 sible, it seems almost, would it be to live without them! 



But passing over apparently greater things, how mvich is the world indebted 

 to the chemist and inventor for so simple and now so common a thing as the 

 friction match ? Prometheus, according to the ancient fable, was chained to a 

 rock and tortured in punishment for stealing fire from heaven and giving it to 

 man. Unlike Prometheus we now get our fire rather from the brimstone 

 dominions. 



The savage could only kindle a fire by rubbing two sticks together so long 

 and so hard that they would ignite. After this came the flint, the steel and the 

 tinder box. Towards the close of the last century chemists succeeded in mak- 

 ing a clumsy and costly lucifer match by tipping splinters of dry wood in 

 chlorate of potash and sugar: these on being dipped into sulphuric acid would 

 kindle and burn. About forty-five 3'ears ago the modern friction match of 

 phosphorous and sulphur was invented and some forty years ago they came at 

 last into common use. Now single establishments consume anuuall}', millions 

 of feet of pine lumber in their manufacture, and they have becoMie so cheap 

 that a couple of dimes will supply a family bountifully with them for a year. 

 How much this means many of you know who remember how we used to burn 

 our noses and almost split our cheeks blowing a coal to light a candle, and how 

 serious a thing it was to let the fire on the hearth go out, compelling some one 

 of tlie family to run a long way to a neighbor to borrow fire. Xow "give me a 

 light," either for candles or for pipes has hardly a meaning. 



We have now examined our indebtedness to the artisan, the inventor, and to 

 the scientist — for the scientist, if not the inventor, must precede the inventor, 

 — by studying the condition of men three to five hundred years ago, and we 

 have taken a hasty glance at some of the great and useful inventions the pres- 

 ent century has given to the world. Let us, for the sake of getting a little 

 more nearly face to face with the matter, now compare the conditions of the 

 common people, like ourselves — say the farming class of forty or fifty years 

 ago, and right here in Michigan — with the condition of the same class of to- 

 day. This I trust will give us a view of what we owe to mechanical skill and 

 invention which we will all understand; and in this comparison I must be per- 

 mitted to draw quite freely from my own recollections. 



The farmer of forty or fifty years ago had bought his laud — a forty or an 

 eighty, or, it may be, a quarter section — of government at ten shillhigs per 

 acre. It was mostly heavily timbered. Manfully he must swing the ax, tmd 

 " log " and burn to clear a few acres. These acres he plowed with a clumsy 

 cast-iron, — sometimes a wooden plow — harrowed it with an old-fashioned letter 

 A drag, with iron or wooden teeth and a log tied across it. His team w.^s oxen. 

 He sowed his grain, "broadcast," by hand, or if he was an Englishman 

 "dibbled " it in with sticks. He planted his corn by hand, cultivated it with a 

 shovel plow and a pony, and with a hoe. and when it was ripe what he needed 

 for meal he shelled across the edge of a shovel blade, and fed the rest on the 

 cob to his stock and his hogs. He cut his grass with a hand scythe, — one acre 

 be'ng a good day's work — raked it with a hand rake, pitched it by hand with a 

 two-tined fork, and perhaps carried it on poles to the barn or stack. He har- 

 vested his wheat and rye with a sickle, or more generally with a "turkey wing " 

 grain cradle, and spent many a winter's day threshing it with a flail, and 



o 



