200 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



wagon is to the great interior, — the pioneer of manufacturing 

 enterprise, as that is of permanent settlement. The cotton, the 

 machinery, the iron, the silk, the paper manufactures follow, and 

 build up our Lowells, Patersons, and Manchesters. This is no 

 fancy sketch. We remember the time when the Salmon Falls 

 River, between Maine and New Hampshire, watering a district 

 which was occupied by one of the earliest and important settle- 

 ments in New England, dating back to 1632, had no other manu- 

 facturing establishment than a saw-mill, a grist-mill, and a fulling- 

 mill. The latter disappeared, and was succeeded, in 1828, by a 

 well-appointed woollen factory. Afterwards came other woollen 

 factories and cotton mills ; and the Salmon Falls River moves now 

 one hundred and thirty- two thousand cotton spindles and fourteen 

 sets of woollen machinery." This is but a type of the march of 

 manufactures everywhere in the country. They propagate them- 

 selves by contagion ; or, like the banyan tree, their branches 

 descend and become trees. The communities where they are 

 planted become imbued with industrial instinct and knowledge. 

 Hence, practical men say that the best place to plant a new mill 

 is by the very side of those which have been long established. 

 Manufactures not only propagate themselves, but engender other 

 industries, as cultivation, with new plants and flowers, attracts and 

 multipliesthe birds and insects. Theerection ofa woollen mill of two 

 or three sets, in a new State, which seems to us a trifling afl'air, is 

 an epoch, the dawn of manufactures, which all experience tells us 

 will expand into a widely diversified industry, and its attendant 

 results of wealth and culture. 



Demands high Intelligence. One reason for the influence of 

 the woollen manufactures is the high character of intelligence and 

 skill required for its successful pursuit. In this respect it un- 

 doubtedly stands at the very head of the textile industries. Great, 

 undoubtedly, as was the genius displayed by those who introduced 

 the cotton manufacture in its present form into this country, there 

 is much less required in continuing its fabrication. The whole 

 product of a mill often consists of but a single fabric. As Mr. 

 Bachclder, the most eminent cotton manufacturer living in this or 

 any other country, says : " Thousands of looms are employed 

 making drillings, of precisely the same description, with the same 

 number of threads both in the warp and filling, of the same aver- 

 age weight, with yarn of the same fineness, and without the least 



