4 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



your own judges, though to our intellectual and spiritual parts 

 they may yield largely without a dollar going into the pocket. 

 It is true that nature's answers to our interrogatories abound 

 in negatives. Is this the condition of success ? Is this the 

 condition of success ? we ask her, and she returns a dozen 

 negatives to one affirmative, but in the hands of the intelligent 

 cultivator negative truths can be turned to a positive advantage. 

 If a man has not learned the road to take to a destination he 

 desires to reach, yet he is helped towards the right rotid every 

 time he ascertains that any particular road is a wrong one. 



To learn how far the tillers of the soil have advanced in 

 correct and extensive observation and thorough experiment — 

 experiments that shall draw from mother nature all the infor- 

 mation she is capable of giving to the questions put, we very 

 naturally turn to our agricultural papers. These are conducted 

 on the excellent idea of having farmers make their own papers, 

 the business of the editor in the agricultural department being 

 a general intelligent supervision, the supplying each number 

 with a well-digested, comprehensive leader, the supplying from 

 the fertility of his own knowledge or from exchanges whatever 

 is wanting in the articles of contributors to cover the whole 

 field of investigation, a discreet use of the veto power and of 

 the pen among the weekly harvest, distributing generously from 

 his own brains among the necessitous, and attending to the 

 thousand other matters which make up the business of the 

 faithful, laborious editor. And here let me urge on my friends 

 not to be contented with subscribing for a single agricultural 

 paper. If a farmer cannot really afford to subscribe for more 

 than one — and he must be a very poor farmer indeed, who is 

 so circumstanced — that ends the matter ; but do not reason as 

 so many appear to with whom 1 have conversed, that you don't 

 need the Ploughman or the Cultivator, because you take the 

 Farmer; or the Farmer or Cultivator, because you take the 

 Ploughman; or the Farmer or Ploughman, because you take 

 the Cultivator. Such farmers will never buy shovels while 

 they have hoes, nor purchase hoes while a rake is in the barn. 

 Of the three papers I have named, neither includes the other; 

 is there any reason, therefore, in saying that because you 

 subscribe for one you do not subscribe for others ? Each of 

 these papers, as an agricultural paper, fills a sphere of its own, 



