198 ANNUAL REPORT OF NEW-YORK 



here. Many farmers have labored with unreasoliable severity 

 during the summer months. The mind, meanwhile, has been 

 comparatively inactive. A distaste for study, consecutive thought, 

 investigation, reading, was a natural, almost a necessary conse- 

 quence; and too often the ensuing winter has passed in a sort of 

 listless indifference to everything but the stalls and the wood pile. 



At this point comes in the special value of improved imple- 

 ments and labor-saving machinery. They are to ease the hus- 

 bandman of that too severe summer's labor. They are to prevent 

 the mind's being borne down by an over-tasked body. They are 

 to leave the farmer more elastic at the end of his summer's 

 work. Verily, they are to give him some odds and ends of time 

 for reading during the summer and that in a state not too wearied 

 to enjoy it and to profit by it. And they are to leave him at the 

 close of the working season, not with a dislike, but with a keen 

 relish for books, prepared to alternate the less severe labors of 

 winter with reading and study, something adopted not for making 

 him a wiser farmer for next year than he may have been this, 

 but for elevating his standing in the community, as a man and a 

 citizen. It is for this, more than anything else, that improved 

 implements and labor-saving machinery are to be valued. Their 

 influence in favor of the farmer will be immense, if he rightly 

 improves the advantages they give. The reaper and the mower, 

 the horse hoe and the horse rake are not alone to save the 

 wheat and the hay, and to conquer the weeds, but to give the 

 man better opportunities and a higher position. If true to him- 

 self, he will not omit the opportunities, nor fail of a higher 

 position, than the world has ever yet accorded to his profession. 



Farmers sometimes think, and not unfrequently think aloud, 

 that the farmer cannot learn much, that his employment is unfa- 

 vorable to intellectual activity, that his perceptions are necessarily 

 slow and his memory poor. If anything of this sort has been 

 true of the past, it need not be of the future. Improvements 

 already inaugurated, and those yet to be introduced, will give the 

 farmers of the coming age an immense advantage over those of 

 the past. That crops will hereafter be more abundant than 

 hitherto, ih proportion to the hand labor required for their produc- 

 tion; or in other words, that a given amount of hand labor, in 

 connection with the improved implements and methods, will give 



