50 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



ful soil of the land of their birth, and having heard of more 

 productive fields and milder skies far towards the setting 

 sun, and feeling, like Father Abraham, they were called to 

 go out to possess a new and better land, obeyed the sum- 

 mons, packed up their unsold traps and started for the un- 

 seen realm, with their horses and cattle and wagons, " women 

 and children piled on top, and pots and kettles dangling and 

 clanging beneath," — -journeying by day and camping by 

 night, — hoping everything and fearing nothing, a crowd of 

 strong-bodied, strong-willed, long-winded, long-sided, whit- 

 tling and whistling and smoking, shooting and swapping 

 Yankee Arab wanderers, with axes and knapsacks on their 

 backs, rifles on their shoulders, and pistols in their belts, 

 bent on locating and squatting down where they should not 

 have a neighbor within five hundred miles, more or less, — 

 and there they settled, in a land of immeasurable fertility, of 

 unspeakable fever and ague, as destitute of the comforts, as 

 it was of the schools, the churches and colleges of dear New 

 England. Yet men they were of the right blood and the 

 right mind, and so, as step by step, they rescued from the 

 savagery of barbarism the wide domain of the great West, 

 they inaugurated in every village and town, as they sprang 

 into life, the means of that intellectual, moral and religious 

 culture to which we owe the goodness and the greatness of 

 the land they left behind them. 



Now, what is book-farming, — whence did it come and how 

 did it take its book form ? "Why, from the manuscript of 

 some writer, whose written words the printer set up in types, 

 and multiplied and circulated copies, that many eyes and not 

 a few might read, and many minds and not a few might 

 learn and know. But whence the written form? Why, it 

 is but the recorded memory of what some practical farmer, 

 or some agricultural experimenter, has proved by his own 

 actual trials and experience to be of practical utility, and so 

 he has written it down that the information may be diffused 

 for the general good. Now if you read this in a book, and 

 are counselled how to proceed in order to increase your 

 product, will you toss away the information from you with 

 contempt because it is bookish, and you don't believe in book- 



