42 N. H. STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



therefore, England has not the inducements to stimulate 

 the highest amount of production, which countries, like 

 China, Holland and Belgium, find in au exceeding density 

 of population, yet the necessity of diffusing and dissemina- 

 ting her overgrown wealth, furnishes a reason almost as 

 powerful for carrying the refinements of agriculture to a 

 pitch where it ceases to be very highly remunerative to 

 the land owner. We are not yet arrived at this condition. 

 Sound economy, public or private, does not require or in- 

 deed permit us to raise the largest possible crops, or breed 

 the highest blooded stock; and, therefore, in seeking agri- 

 cultural instruction in foreign lands it is, ordinarily, the 

 general principles, not the most highly perfected methods, 

 that we shall find worthy of adoption. 



But I proceed to my sketches. In travelling on the Eu- 

 ropean continent, the first point which will strike an eye 

 trained to geographical as well as agricultural observation, 

 will probably be the exceeding smoothness of surface of 

 the cultivated land. Not that the fields are flat or the in- 

 clinations regularly graded; on the contrary, the view is 

 diversified with rocky ledge, and plain, and valley, and 

 Bwelling knoll and slanting hill-side ; but a long course of 

 cultivation has obliterated the minor irregularities and in- 

 equalities of the natural surface, reduced the sharpness of 

 the angles, removed the smaller rocks, filled the dried up 

 water courses, and thus given the whole landscape a roll- 

 ing outline, whose graceful curves, moreover, are seldom 

 broken by hedge, or fence, or other artificial enclosure. 



The next novel feature which will attract the notice of 

 a traveller over the great and most frequented roads of 

 Europe will be the absence of any thing which corresponds 

 with an American's idea of a forest. In England, and in 

 many countries on the continent, any considerable extent 

 of unimproved and unenclosed ground, though bare of trees 

 or even arborescent shrubs, is called a forest, the name 

 having been retained after the proper original charactcristio 



