350 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



It is true some fields are naturally more productive than others : 

 the alluvial bottoms are more productive than the old pine 

 plains that are considered wholly unfit for cultivation ; but I 

 have seen fine crops of wheat and clover growing upon land as 

 poor as the poorest sandy plain in this county, by the simple 

 addition of two hundred pounds of Peruvian guano to the 

 acre. I have no doubt it can be done here as well as in Vir- 

 ginia. 



Do you think that you could convince by argument or mere 

 assertion, a man who has always grown Indian corn upon land 

 that never yielded him ten bushels per acre of any thing but 

 nubbins, that others have frequently grown two hundred bush- 

 els of sound ears upon every acre of large fields ? or that one 

 hundred and fifty bushels of shelled corn had been frequently 

 produced, and occasionally still larger crops ? Actual demon- 

 stration only could convince such men ; and for this purpose it 

 is good to bring them together to such festivals as this, where 

 we can drink in whole draughts of knowledge at every step ; 

 and unless we wilfully close our cars and eyes, we must go 

 away wiser men, women and children, than we were when we 

 left home this morning. Ocular demonstration is a kind of 

 proof that no sane man can reject, however self-opinionated he 

 may be: and if he sees better wheat, rye, oats, potatoes, or 

 bigger ears of Indian corn than he ever grew himself, he will 

 be obliged to think that such things have been produced; 

 and let me tell you that thinking is the first step towards im- 

 proving. 



You may say that the man who rejected ocular demonstration 

 was a stubborn fool ; but was he any more so than the farmer 

 who sticks to the old routine of corn, rye, oats, buckwheat, 

 year after year, upon the same shallow-ploughed unmanured 

 fields ; or cultivates his barren hill-sides, while a muck swamp 

 lies idle at the foot ; or leaves the orchard planted by his grand- 

 father untrimmed, because his father left it so, and consequently 

 grows a kind of apples known as "five to the half pint;" the 

 only advantage of which is, that all that grow he gets, for the 

 most intolerable apple-stealing boy in the community would be 

 ashamed to be accused of robbing so mean an orchard ? He 

 was no more stubborn than the man who will not buy a new 

 plough, because the old one is good enough ; or perhaps, in his 



