476 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



tioned and incongruous, repulsive to the votaries at its shrine, 

 inefficient in its influence and abortive in its mission, — or you 

 can, if you will, adorn and beautify its rising columns, crowd 

 its broad and lofty portals with devotees bringing their sheaves 

 with them and fixing their trophies in its very dome, till it shall 

 become the just pride, and, under God, the ultimate preserver 

 of the Commonwealth. Build ye, for yourselves and for pos- 

 terity. 



THE PROGRESS OF AGRICULTURE. 

 From an Address before the Norfolk Society. 



BY REV. F. D. HUNTINGTON. 



There is a rather irregular and unorganized, but on the whole 

 progressive, body of information, which is called, by courtesy, 

 the Science of Agriculture. It is gradually taking the shape 

 and proportions, under your intelligent authors and periodicals, 

 of other and exacter sciences. If we seize this body of knowl- 

 edge precisely in its present position, and speak to its present 

 exigency, we shall find, I suspect, that it has passed through its 

 first stage, viz. : its era of general discovery, and is now wait- 

 ing for the patient hand of detailed experiment, and the organ- 

 izing effects of a comprehensive induction. 



I said it has passed through its first stage, or era of general 

 discovery. The fact is, it passed through that stage so long ago, 

 and stood still so long after, that it might reasonably have been 

 doubted whether it ever meant to go on. If there is any thing 

 amazing in human history, I suppose it is the stationary atti- 

 tude assumed by this radical employment of man, from the 

 period of its origin in Syria, which must have been somewhere 

 near Adam's time, down to about the present century. Con- 

 sider that the race of proper ploughs — the only ploughs we 

 should recognize as worthy the name — the basis implement of 

 the whole business — is only about eighty years old. One apol- 

 ogy offered for this protracted state of catalepsy is an alleged 



