FOURTH DISTRICT AGRICULTURAL ASSOCIATION:. 279 



As man has learned the hivvs and conquered the forces of nature, 

 alchemy has given place to chemistry, astrology to astronomy, the 

 whale oil lamp to the gas-burner, and the gas-jets hide their ineffect- 

 ual tires before the electric light which makes the night even as the 

 day. 



We talk about the change produced by the railway and the tele- 

 graph, but the less conspicuous revolution in domestic life is quite as 

 benehcial and as marvelous, (jo back with me to the time of Cicero 

 and I will suppose somebody here is his guest at his palace on the 

 Palatine. You sleep on a marble couch with a block of wood for a 

 pillow. On rising your feet rest on cold marble slabs, for carpets 

 never occurred to anybody till the race had been plodding along 

 about five thousand years. You have no stockings to put on, for 

 nobody had yet thought of them in Cicero's time, nor for a good 

 many hundred years after. You look for pins. The idea of pins 

 never entered the heads nor their points the bodies of the first one 

 hundred and fifty generations of our race. No glass windows admit 

 the light to Cicero's palace, and think of it, no mirror in the house 

 but a metal one! Did you ever when camping out make your toilet 

 before your reflection in the bottom of a tin pan ? There is no chim- 

 ney to conduct the smoke away in Cicero's palace. Well, you come 

 to breakfast. What! No tea, coffee, nor sugar? No! But here is 

 venison. " Will you give me a knife and fork ? " Forks ? A Roman 

 never saw one. Fingers were made about five thousand years before 

 forks. Cicero, with the only knife on the table, cuts off the meat in 

 bits, which the guests put where it will do the most good, with their 

 fingers. Breakfast over you will rest while Cicero's daughter Julia 

 spins the stuff for her own gowns. But there is not a lounge, or sofa, 

 or chair in the house — only a few stone stools about as comfortable as 

 tombstones. There is no watch or clock to tell the time, no maga- 

 zines or books, except a lot of rolls tied up like music holders. You 

 open one; it is one hundred feet long and begins: Quousqiie tandem 

 abutcre, Catalina, patientia nostra? Wherefore is Cataline always to 

 abuse our patience? You sit down to write. They hand you a 

 sharpened stick of wood for a pen, and a piece of sheepskin on which 

 to write a dainty note to your lover, and you send your letter to him 

 by a courier who goes on foot thirty miles a day. But you need not 

 go back so far to find what the world would be without modern 

 inventions. Our own mothers drew water with a well-sweep; cooked 

 by an open fire; stitched and wcfve and spun their lives away. But 

 to-day we have gas and water; the sewing machine in the work room, 

 and the piano in the parlor. We have patent baby incubators and 

 nursing bottles; patent baby jumpers; patent carts to ride in; stoves 

 to cook on; bedsteads to sleep on, and patent caskets to be buried in. 

 We live as much in our thirty-three years as the antediluvians did 

 in nine hundred and sixty-nine years. 



I come now to speak of man's conquest of the soil. 



Said Daniel Webster: "There are three pillars upon which society 

 rests: Agriculture, Manufactures, and Commerce, but the greatest of 

 these is Agriculture." The king is fed by the field, without it the 

 food of man is limited to the flesh of wild animals and the sponta- 

 neous production of the earth. Without it commerce and manufac- 

 tures could not exist, and the arts and sciences would be unknown. 

 By the culture of the soil men are able to produce more than they 

 require, so that the remainder are enabled to turn their -talents and 



