EDUCATED FARM LABOR. 65 



grow with reluctance. Here is a field for scientific effort. 

 Despair not — ashes and decomposed peat and clay, if you can 

 get them, will do much. You may yet see the turf growing on 

 these soils as thick and green as that which now covers the 

 hill-sides. 



The alluviums are the gold mines of our country. They are 

 deposits of peat and swamp mud, and the soils along the river 

 bottoms, which are sands and clays, mingled by the agency of 

 the streams, with the organic matter that has grown upon their 

 shores. Pure organic matter will not grow the finer grasses, 

 nor the grains which we. cultivate. But spread it upon your 

 diluviums, or your diluviums upon that, and clover, corn, oats, 

 any thing valuable, will grow upon the mixture. There are two 

 hundred thousand cords of peat and meadow mud in the town of 

 Wilbraham* alone, which could be spared with advantage from 

 the places vvdiich it now occupies, and there are hundreds of 

 of acres almost barren lands in the county waiting for its recep- 

 tion. But there it lies — no muck rake touches it. It don't pay 

 its owners a dime. Some don't know that it exists ; others don't 

 believe it has any value. 



Gentlemen : you may think you understand your own 

 resources better than I do, but I venture to assert that many of 

 you have the means of coining dollars upon your farms, and 

 you do not know that you possess them ; or, you have so little 

 faith in v^diat you ought to knoio, you will not risk even a hun- 

 dred dollars in experiment. I know a meadow cut into two 

 parts by a ditch ; on the one side it grows two tons of hay to 

 the acre, on the other it grows nothing but shrubby potentillas, 

 and the man who owns the potentillas does not think it will pay 

 to improve his part of the meadow. He dare not trust his own 

 eyes. 



Gentlemen : I would remind you o^ the fact, that you have 

 charged yourselves with the important duty of developing the 

 agricultural resources of this county. How are you to do it ? 

 How will you cause the laboring hand to be always guided by 

 intelligence ? Annual fairs do something — they must be con- 



* In the State Report of the Geology of Massachusetts, no mention is made 

 of peat in any town of Hampden County, except Longmeadow. A minute- 

 survey of each town v/ould add much to the resources known to exist. See 

 Geol. Rep., vol. 1, pp. 144-5. 



