62 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE, 



EISE OF AGRICULTUEE. 



From an Address before the Norfolk Agricultural Society. 



BY THEODORE LYMAN. 



In the very nature of things, it seems as if digging the earth 

 ought to bring something good to pass. The Greeks, who 

 seldom went wrong in a name, called earth mother ; the 

 mother from whom all come and to whom all return ; the 

 mother who teaches her children this lesson, that food follows 

 work, and without work there is no food ; the mother who 

 tames her wild oflspring by long and steady discipline of toil. 

 For man is by nature a destroyer and a waster. The savage 

 kills fish and game, and snatches wild berries and roots, 

 thoughtless of their decrease. In the ancient shell-heaps of 

 Denmark, or in the river gravels of France, we find the mute 

 record of such savages who once peopled the larger part of 

 Central Europe. It is a dreary record — everything for waste, 

 and nothing for renewal. The flint hatchets, knives and 

 arrow-heads, the piles of shells, the bones of deer and wild 

 oxen, split to get out the marrow, — all denote a race that took 

 what they could from nature, and returned her nothing. They 

 had no ear for the lessons of Mother Earth. There are some 

 children nowadays who will not mind their mothers, and 

 who ffet sent to the State Reform School. The reform of 

 those old oyster-eaters and bone-splitters was very gradual. 

 Archreologists tell us that they first became pastoral in their 

 habits, and took to keeping horses. Now I am not going to 

 assert, in the presence of our honored president, that horse- 

 raisin «• is a semi-barbaric practice ; but the archseolosfical 

 succession does go to prove that wheat-growing is a step 

 beyond it. Nor do I maintain that the men of the ancient 



