INFLUENCE OF THE AGRICULTURAL PRESS. 3Q-T 



press has been the one grand agency. In politics and the science 

 of government, in mechanics, in the industrial and economic 

 arts, in the sciences, in the homely business of agriculture, the 

 press has been the chief aid to the improvements wrought, the 

 great means of preserving the thought and life of the people. 

 Without it, the existence of many inventions and improvements 

 would never have been known, and but for its influence, the 

 world would have been a waste of mental darkness. Strike the 

 press out of existence and the world would relapse into barbarism ; 

 the arts and inventions and discoveries which minister to the 

 enjoyment and happiness of mankind would be forgotten ; man 

 would become but a mere mechanical organism. Encourage and 

 support the press, and you continue to advance farther and 

 farther into the clear and unmistakable light of wisdom and 

 knowledge. 



Let us now narrow our line of thought down to the business of 

 farming and the influence of the farmer's paper. How slow and 

 cumbersome the means by which useful discoveries in agriculture 

 were disseminated before the days of the farmer's journal ! A 

 hard-working man, plodding along with his weary labor, works out 

 with the aid of his own mind and hands some new mode of per- 

 forming a certain piece of work, or makes some discovery in the 

 pursuit of farming he has not before known, but which he is satis- 

 fied, in the light of his weak faith and still weaker knowledge, is 

 to be a benefit to all who take advantage of it. Becoming sure of 

 its value, perhap % s only after two or three years' patient trial, he 

 tells it to his neighbors. Following his directions they adopt the 

 method he has practiced, or use the implement he has invented, 

 with the same result. As years go on, other neighbors still more 

 remote, make use of the new practice, and thus the good results 

 of one man's study and invention travel slowly until perhaps in 

 twenty years, possibly a hundred men may be following his new 

 found methods. As there are no means of communicating this 

 improvement or discovery but by the slow process of neighbor 

 talking with neighbor, and as personal intercourse between distant 

 points is not frequent, the thing makes very slow progress. But 

 in time it comes to be universally adopted, although the man who 

 originally gave the new and better method to the world may have 

 long been forgotten. In contrast, look at the agency of the 

 farmer's journal in diffusing, not merely a knowledge of those 

 inventions for which their originators require a consideration, but 



