60 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



remember that ; and when they know that this man can raise 

 8900 worth of cabbages to an acre, which he could not do hi 

 Illinois ; when they know that he has succeeded in producing, 

 by a mingling of different varieties, cabbages that exceed any 

 that were ever produced before, by his own diligence and dis- 

 cretion ; when they know this, they must recognize that industry, 

 intelligence and skill may be applied just as well on these lands 

 as to the richer lands of the West. I would have this remem- 

 bered, because, let me tell you, that there is no State in this 

 Union — and I have travelled through almost all of them, 

 Virginia, Pennsylvania, with her rich valleys, New York, fertile 

 as she is — there is no State in which a man can devote ■ himself 

 to the specific branch of agriculture, with all the powers which 

 God has bestowed upon him, so well as here in Massachusetts. 

 You have a city for a market within almost every twenty square 

 miles ; you have an industrious, wealthy population ; you have 

 every variety of soil ; you have every opportunity to make this 

 State as good an agricultural district as the Moors made Spain, 

 or the Romans ever made of Italian valleys. Now, why go 

 abroad ? There is no occasion for it. Let us take it for granted 

 that there is as good an opportunity for intelligent farming here 

 as anywhere, and turn our attention to our own soils and 

 grasses, and I think we shall get along full as well as if we 

 emigrated to the West. We here in Essex County have done a 

 little. Last autumn I was in New York State, surrounded by 

 all the agricultural wealth of that great Mohawk A" alley, speak- 

 ing to the people there in the open air upon practical and 

 scientific agriculture ; and it occurred to me what was going on 

 at home. I said, if they would excuse me, I would tell them 

 that in the little county of Essex, rock-bound, abandoned to the 

 north-east winds until it seemed to be stunted in all its vege- 

 table growth, men had produced, in the first place, out of the 

 industry and skill of their practical farming, the best formed 

 and most productive onion that could be grown for market ; in 

 the same way they had improved the cultivation of the cabbage 

 until they had bred the stone mason ; in the same way a young 

 man in Salem, throwing all the theories of hybridization to the 

 winds, had, on the land of a little garden, grown the best table 

 grape in the world. All that, I said, had been done by careful, 

 industrious and capable farmers, and I wished to remind them 



