256 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



to till it, and for want of seeds to plant. A few winters 

 would starve our cattle, a few years would bring famine to 

 ourselves. The cities, which have their roots in the country, 

 would be paralyzed in every industry, in all their traffic, in 

 all their commerce. The North would be depopulated by 

 starvation or by emigration to snowless and frostless lati- 

 tudes, and onl}^ a few hunters in winter, or herdsmen in sum- 

 mer, would break the solitudes of a New England desolation. 



Our wealth, our enterprise, our intelligence, and our very 

 virtue depend in large degree upon our agriculture ; and our 

 agriculture is the result of experience, and therefore depends 

 mainly upon experiment. Agricultural experiment then, it 

 cannot be denied, is an exceedingly weighty matter. 



But, as agriculture has grown in the past from small begin- 

 nings and by slow degrees, until it has subdued the forests 

 and dried up the morasses of nearly all Europe, and much of 

 North America, and has raised our savage and plundering 

 German and Anglo-Saxon ancestry to such habit of doing 

 and having that their posterity, by sheer inheritance of char- 

 acter and possessions, now comprise the foremost nations of 

 the world,^o agriculture must go on to grow, winning more 

 acreage from forest and swamp, building more railroads and 

 steamships, more cities and manufactories, and employing 

 an ever-increasing force of men and women, horses, water- 

 wheels, and engines to do its traffic, turn its useful raw pro- 

 ducts into more useful fabrics and foods, or to supply its 

 incessant demand for more tools, machines and fertilizers. 



Our soil is a mine of ir finitely more riches than all the gold 

 veins or placers of California and Colorado. Out of it the 

 farmer digs our food and our clothes, and that mainly sums 

 up the wealth of most of us. This riches of the soil may be 

 easily squandered, and much of it now is from mere ignorance 

 as good as thrown away. It may be restored also. Unlike 

 metallic ore, which once dug out and skillfully smelted is for- 

 ever worthless, the soil has a productive power of unlimited 

 duration. The agencies that made soil from rock in the ages 

 past, are perpetually at work making new soil from the rock 



