TRANSACTIONS. 83 



jR^liich are notoriously as easily friglitened as the liare, is 

 in some degree owing to the partial destruction of their 

 sight by the practice of keeping them in the dark, to spare 

 them the annoyance of flies. Any animal thus kept, and 

 then often brought suddenly into the glare of the sun, 

 must inevitably become purblind ; and I can only account 

 for the fact that our horses will shv on meeting a wheel- 

 barrow which they have seen a thousand times, by the 

 supposition that the unnatural darkness in which they are 

 kept has so dimmed their sight, that they do not distinctly 

 discern the objects around them. 



Let me here enter a protest against a single European 

 abuse out of the many which might be specified; and then, 

 after a few general remarks on the benefits which agricul- 

 ture may be expected to derive from physical science and 

 the extension of geographical knowledge, and upon the 

 spontaneous vegetation of Europe, I will release you. 



The abuse I referred to is the almost universal employ- 

 ment of women in field work on the continent of Europe. 

 I have rarely seen them act as teamsters, or mow or hold 

 the plow, but there is scarcely any other species of agri- 

 cultural labor, which is not in the largest proportion per- 

 formed by women. I have often seen them even carrying 

 stone, gravel, and earth, for repairing the roads, in baskets 

 on their heads, and in one instance, I observed the building 

 of a very heavy railroad embankment almost exclusively 

 by this method ; about five hundred women and boys being 

 occupied in transporting the earth for the filling, a distance 

 of about five hundred yards up a steep ascent. Field 

 labor is not only prejudicial to the health of women, but 

 it tends irresistibly to deprive them of the softness and 

 grace of their sex, to assimilate them to the coarseness of 

 the men with whom they work, to disqualify them for the 

 duties appropriated to them by nature, and in short to de- 

 base and brutify their ^7hole cliaracter. It is well known 

 that women are nowhere treated with so much consider- 



