AGRICULTURAL SOCIETIES. 131 



ure of their need ; and yet it is not altogether so. The need is 

 greater than the measure would indicate, and in fact it is only 

 as we consider the causes which have been working for genera- 

 tions to make great efforts now an essential part of the present 

 agricultural situation, that we appreciate fully the agricultural 

 problems of the day. 



I hope to be pardoned for digressing here, for the purpose of 

 offering some observations which may not seem to have a bear- 

 ing upon the main subject, but which, nevertheless, may lend 

 an earnestness to our views, as members of the Middlesex 

 South Society, and thus make us more laborious in its behalf, 

 and the cause. When people first began to pour into the New 

 World from the Old, they found a virgin soil. Since the world 

 began, nature in this quarter has been preparing the soil for the 

 husbandman, had put into it all needful plant-food ; and it was 

 only needful for the European, when he came upon the scene, 

 to cut away the trees, let in sunshine, plant and await the har- 

 vest, assured it would be abundant. But when the trees were 

 cut away, the climate made drier, and the land given over to 

 the plough, and annually a crop taken from the land equal, and 

 more than equal, to the annual growth of forest, then the situa- 

 tion changed, and the land, instead of becoming richer with 

 each annual growth, became poorer. Nature's method is to re- 

 turn to the soil an equivalent to what she takes from it. Each 

 crop of leaves falling to the ground adds a layer of fertile loam, 

 from which springs forth a new crop of leaves. But there is 

 ever an increasing residue, so that the processes of growth and 

 decay go on, and there is annual increase of depth and fertility 

 of soil. The plant draws from the atmosphere much plant-food, 

 and at its death lays it in the earth. Our husbandry has been 

 of a different sort ; it has been a defiance of inflexible natural 

 laws ; we have been thieves, so to speak, in the Lord's vineyard, 

 until we have prospered, so as to have greatly added to our 

 population, enclosed all the land, and made farms everywhere. 

 But having done this much, and feeling, perhaps, somewhat 

 settled in our prosperity, we are startled to discover our lands 

 becoming annually exhausted of the properties that plant-growths 

 require, and that they must be farmed after a different manner, 

 or the native born of New England must quit their farms for 

 other labor, or seek farms in the virgin West. 



