AGEICULTURAL HEAD-WORK. 21 



tion is qiiito as possible as improvement. Man, in neglect, will 

 run back into barbarity — the undeveloped type of human life. 

 Who can think that the fruits of the earth will be any more 

 stable ? You may have seen the account of wheat recently raised 

 in France from seeds preserved in the coffin of one of the Gallic 

 kings, and of course, fourteen centuries old, at least. It has 

 been proved to be identical, in its botany, with the wheat of 

 the present day. But it produces from sixteen to twenty stalks 

 to a grain, and has an average of twenty grains more on each 

 stalk, than any wheat of the present day will produce ; and 

 each grain is heavier. 



Now, I ask, what has man to say for himself that he has 

 thus let the " staff of life " run down in his hands ? He ought 

 to have improved it. It would have been mean enough to have 

 said, " There hast thou that is thine," without intere&t, with- 

 out betterment. But he has been eating his best grain, gene- 

 ration after generation, or reaping and selling the earliest of 

 his harvesting because it paid best; and he has often sowed 

 the seed of a poor crop, which he could not sell, because some 

 untoward circumstances had injured it, when he ought, if it 

 were necessary, to have picked out kernel by kernel, so as to 

 have been sure of good seed, at all events. Considering their 

 ignorance, it is not worth while to say hard things of men who 

 lived in a darker period of the world, and on the other side of 

 the Atlantic, But it would be a mighty problem in arithmetic, 

 to estimate the comfort and wealth which might have been 

 enjoyed, if the produce of every wheat-field for fourteen centu- 

 ries, with the same expenditure of labor, had been fifteen per 

 cent, greater than it was. The lesson is, not to repeat such a 

 blunder, which, now-a-days, would be a crime. 



I cannot, however, but call your attention to the fact that 

 every year's cropping is making it less and less likely to keep 

 the present races of vegetable life in as good order as they now 

 are, without constantly increasing care, because every year 

 introduces new varieties into the fields and gardens ; and these 

 are the results of good and bad mixtures, and themselves the 

 ready fertilizers of another year's seeds. But the multiplica- 

 tion of new varieties also tends to tlie neglect of old ones, 

 some of Avhich may be better than those with more modern 

 names. The progress is not very valuable, which only substi- 



