FARMERS NEED A HIGHER EDUCATION. 49 



The cultivation of the turnip, by Tull's method of drilling 

 and horse-hoeing, though ridiculed by the old, the ignorant 

 and the prejudiced, has actually trebled in value thousands of 

 acres of light lands, the value of the crop sometimes surpass- 

 ing that of the fee simple of the land. From the time of the 

 Restoration down to the present day, the union of mind, 

 capital and labor, the introduction of new roots and grasses, 

 the alternation of crops, the methods of drainage and irriga- 

 tion, carried to a great extent, have made and will continue to 

 make England almost the garden of the world. 



And now, what, at its beginning, was- the agriculture of 

 New England, with its early Puritan Fathers, who, " accus- 

 tomed in their own native land to no more than a plain coun- 

 try life and the innocent trade of husbandry," followed (both 

 from choice and necessity) the same occupation here ? Their 

 early harvests were eminently fruitless, so that, even in the 

 third year of their settlement, they often knew not at night 

 where they should get a bite in the morning. Their culture 

 was that which they practised at home, modified by the dif- 

 ference of climate and of soil here, where they had no beasts 

 of burden, scanty supply of seed, with few laborers and 

 small yield of harvest. For a century and a half subsequent 

 to the first breaking up of these wild lands, the system of 

 tillage all over New England was essentially the same, and 

 comparatively unprofitable, the mere delving and drudging of 

 farming, with few or none of its present substantial encour- 

 agements. It was hand without the head, with the same ob- 

 stinate prejudices against " book-farming," as any scientific 

 suggestions were called, and the same attachment to old 

 ways, old implements, old management of the soil, old sys- 

 tems of cropping, old systems of treating manures, and of 

 giving them to the soil, — systems containing some good things 

 for a certainty, and some very poor things of an equal cer- 

 tainty, — among which poor things are the monstrous waste of 

 manures, amounting to millions of dollars annually, by neg- 

 lect and exposure, and the omission to compost dropped ma- 

 nures with the muck of meadows and the leaf mould of 

 woods. 



Some of these men, within our memories, growing weary 

 of this ceaseless toil, of the hard climate, and of the ungrate- 

 7* 



