62 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



the early colonists giving their attention chiefly to the growth of 

 grain, their cattle being allowed to shift for themselves and left to 

 subsist as they best could on the natural grasses, herbage and browse 

 within their reach. 



In subsequent years the sons of these same colonists in their pro- 

 gress •west^Yard have pursued much the same mode. After a period, 

 varying with the natural fertility of the soil, but equally sure to 

 come, whether at Plymouth or Jamestown, in the Genessee valley, 

 in Ohio, or on the prairies farther west, the yield of grain is found 

 seriously to diminish, insomuch that the inquiry is forced upon them, 

 how shall we live? The same inquiry was long ago forced upon the 

 attention of others. The problem has been satisfactorily solved and 

 we may profit by their experience, if we will. 



We are accustomed and with good reason too, to regard the a-^ri- 

 culture of England as immensely in advance of ours, their average 

 crops of grain being larger than our best ones grown upon virgin 

 soils (except in rare instances) and some of their land so rich as to 

 require two grain crops in succession to reduce it to a condition fit 

 for the next crop in their rotation. But such was not always their 

 condition. Less than three centuries since. Sir Hugh Piatt, an agri- 

 cultural writer of the sixteenth century, thus states his motive for 

 undertaking to give instruction in husbandry. "What eie doth 

 not pitty to see the great weeknes and decay of our ancient and 

 common mother the earth, which now is grown so aged and stricken 

 in years, and so wounded at the hart with the ploughmans goad, 

 that she beginneth to faint under the husbandmans hand and 

 groaneth for the decay of her natural balsam. For whose good 

 health and recovery and for the better comfort of sundry simple 

 and needy farmers of this land I have partly undef taken these 

 strange labours, altogether abhorring from my profession, that 

 they might both know and practise some further secrets in their 

 husbandry for the better manuring of their leane and barren 

 groundes with some new sorts of marie not yet knowne or not 

 sufficiently regarded by the best experienced men of our dales." 

 Seeing that he recommends hair, fish, malt dust, salt, ashes, the 

 offal of* slaughter-houses, &c. as among the useful fertilizers "not 

 yet brought into any public use," it can hardly be wondered at 

 that the land began "to faint under the husbandmans hand." 



