86 N. H. STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



the greatest amount of actual aliment, in proportion to 

 the capital, the time, and the labor employed in production. 

 But the most interesting promise of improvement from 

 a better knowledge of the earth we inliabit, lies in another 

 and more obvious direction. It is remarkable that, while 

 the Roman conquerors of Western Asia, the Mohammedan 

 invaders of Christendom, and. at a still later date, monks 

 and crusaders brought from the fertile East, and natural- 

 ized in Europe, numerous most valuable products of the 

 vegetable and the animal kingdom, little has been accom- 

 plished in recent times in the introduction of plants or an- 

 imals unknown, the husbandry of Europe and America. It 

 seems to have been too hastily taken for granted, that 

 these two continents already possessed all the forms of or- 

 ganic life which could be profitably grown or reared in 

 them; and while unbounded labor and expense were incur- 

 red in the amelioration of familiar products, men had ceased 

 to look elsewhere than at home for the best methods and 

 most valuable objects of agricultural industry. The last 

 half century, which has reduced to comparative insignifi- 

 cence the manufactures of Asia, has, at the same time, bet- 

 ter instructed us with regard to the value of the natural 

 productions of those remote and mysterious regions; and 

 we have good ground to believe that our fields are destined 

 to be enriched and enlivened by plants and animals, until 

 now quite strange to us, or but imperfectly made known 

 by descriptive works and scientific collections. France 

 introduced and naturalized the shawl goat of Cashmere 

 and Ti)ibet, more than thirty years since ; and several spec- 

 imens of the yak or mountain ox of central Asia have very 

 lately been brought to that country, in the hope of finding 

 appropriate localities for breeding them in the Pyrenees 

 or other elevated regions of the empire. Madder, which 

 is now cultivated in large quantities with great profit and 

 success in tha south of France, was brought from Asia Mi- 

 nor some time in the last century by a Georgian uoblcmaa. 



