56 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



to have perceived that the men of the pulpit, the bar and the 

 healing art, have lost relatively their altitude, not by depression, 

 but by the elevation of the plane on which the cultivator stands, 

 full up to the lines of their own. Upon this plane, thus lifted 

 up, stand men, fond and proud of their vocation, of large 

 attainments, clear views, living not in or for the past, but for 

 the present and the future, who will pass over to the future all 

 the real knowledge of the past, and suppress its follies — who 

 like Boyle and Bacon know the importance of individual 

 experiments and the fallacy of assuming as true the facts, 

 in their lines of inquiry, that antiquity has passed down. 



So much of the supernatural has in the past been associated 

 with the facts and events of agriculture, and so little confidence 

 have those engaged in it had in their own resources, that aside 

 from certain maxims which experience necessarily enforces, 

 really nothing of scientific value has come down to us. Nor is 

 it wonderful. Their superstitions were insuperable bars to 

 progress. While one divinity had charge of the winds and the 

 storms, frosts came at the bidding of another ; another breathed 

 pestilence and mildew, and the harvests were at the caprice of 

 still another ; and even while the weather was thought the 

 medium through which the sole Supreme showed his indigna- 

 tion and inflicted his judgments, it would be unreasonable — a 

 sin indeed — to be hunting after order and its causes, and he an 

 atheist, who could find in events no specialities, and should 

 look behind them for some fixed and general appointments. 



In this, Christian inquirers of the present day concur, that 

 the records of the real, made by pagan or any other supersti- 

 tion, are no more worthy of credit than the opinions and 

 speculations they contain. In agriculture especially it is to 

 the record of fact and principle that those of us are to look 

 who care for the present and the future. And what a field 

 does this record of them open! Its length and breadth are 

 the world's cultivable area; its subjects exhaustless as the 

 properties, the possible forms and combinations of matter, and 

 the purposes for which God made them. It is a field for the 

 speculative and contemplative, as well as the practical ; for the 

 cultivator of the science of growth and the cultivating grower. 

 Where else can labor find for its toil richer rewards ; for its 

 pastime purer pleasures, or healthier recreations ? Since the 



