64 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



piles which once supported wooden cabins built in a lake, have 

 been found bones of oxen, dogs, and goats ; and, beside them, 

 heaps of wheat and barley. No writing, monument or tradi- 

 tion remains to tell us who were these primitive tillers of the 

 soil who thus sought safety from enemies amid the waters. 

 By their implements, fished up in quantities from the bottom, 

 we know that some of them still maintained the good old 

 fashion of stone tools ; while others more ambitious were able 

 to cast instruments of bronze ; another lesson from Mother 

 Earth who yielded her copper and tin for the melting-pot. 



They were barbarians, with the manners of barbarians ; and 

 it is safe to infer that women did all the field-work, and held 

 undisputed possession of what the French call "the sacred 

 right to labor." The man goes into the Swiss forest, intent, 

 with flint-headed arrow, to slay a red deer ; the woman must 

 till the field, and be back in good season with a bundle of 

 firewood to boil the venison which her lord may eat while she 

 dresses the hide with a stone scraper. To her the duty of 

 gathering, quartering and drying the wild apples for winter 

 use ; their fragments have been found, prototypes of apple- 

 sauce ! She must bring in the grain from the small clearings 

 and store it safely in the lake dwelling, under the eye of its 

 master, who sits lazily chipping a pebble, whereof he will 

 fashion, by some weeks of labor, a spear-head. That woman 

 wrought better than she knew ! While, perchance, her thoughts 

 were only on her barbarian finery — her bronze bracelets and 

 hair-pins — she was founding an ever-glorious reputation as the 

 discoverer of agriculture. It passes my comprehension that 

 writers on woman's rights and woman's superiority have not 

 earlier hit on this capital fact — woman was the discoverer of 

 agriculture. The classic nations recognized it. Ceres of the 

 Romans, Mysia of the Greeks, was not a god, but a goddess, 

 who taught the uses of corn. On the eve of her festival the 

 women drove out of the temple men and dogs, shut the 

 doors, and had a good time by themselves. Alas, genius 

 lives on unconscious of itself ! Woman planted and garnered 

 all through the last of the stone period and beginnino- of that 

 of bronze, unconscious that her praises would be sunsr, ao-es 

 afterwards, by the Norfolk County Agricultural Society. 

 When she quartered and dried those sour wild apples, did she 



