40 N. H. STATE AGRICULTUIIAL SOCIETY. 



has made us conversant. We encounter a people whose 

 tastes, habits, wants, character and institutions are strange 

 to us; whose standard of prosperity and physical and so- 

 cial enjoyment is other than our own, and who consequent- 

 ly employ quite a difierent set of means for attaining the 

 great objects of material life. On all sides we are struck 

 by the force of contrast. The eye everywhere encounters 

 new vegetables, and new methods of growing, securing and 

 employing familiar plants; finds increased value ascribed 

 to products with us deemed unimportant or found unprofit. 

 able ; novel, and for the most part greatly inferior agri- 

 cultural implements ; habitations suited to difTerent atmos- 

 pheric conditions, and planned with a view to secure en- 

 joyments, or to guard against inconveniences and dangers^ 

 unknown or disregarded by us. 



Whatever there is of good or bad in all this novelty> 

 whatever seems deserving of imitation or worthy to be 

 shunned, impresses you much more powerfully, and you are 

 more likely to derive instruction from such observation, 

 than from viewing the nicer agricultural processes of Eng- 

 land, which, though in general, really better suited to our 

 condition and wants, and therefore more worthy of imita- 

 tion, are, nevertheless, too little contrasted with our own 

 to excite an interest powerful enough to rouse us to a 

 faithful study of their advantages, and which seem, besides, 

 to demand too great a length of time, or too large an 

 amount of perseverance and of capital, to be reconciled 

 with the hasty, impatient, and unstable habits, and slender 

 pecuniary means of American agriculturists. 



It is a maxim, old as the time of the Roman agricultural 

 Avriters, that "good farming does not pay." If by " good 

 farming," is meant that system of husbandry which, at 

 whatever cost, brings land into the best possible condition, 

 and keeps it there, aims to grow the largest crops, and to 

 raise the most highly bred stock, the maxim is tru3 with 

 respect to the ccououucal results to the farmer himself, ia 



