320 BOARD OP AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



seldom used alone. In tbe coarse black bread of Europe, rye is used 

 to give lightness, and barley meal, buckwheat, and even bean meal 

 are used as the heavier ingredients. These heavy breads may be 

 nutritious, but they are less easy of digestion and much less 

 palatable. In the Colonies barley bread was always rare. The 

 cultivation of barley began everywhere as soon as that of wheat; 

 but Indian corn, bought from the Indians or grown by the Colo- 

 nists, was so much better for bread than barley, that the latter 

 was everywhere soon abandoned as a bread-grain. Rye flourished 

 well in all the Colonies; it flourished relatively better than wheat 

 in this State, and its flour mixed with that of Indian corn became 

 the basis of the common bread of the country, and " Rye and 

 Indian " remained a common bread down to the time when modern 

 machinery made it easy to farm on an enormous scale on the 

 western prairies, and modern methods of transportation and han- 

 dling grain made it possible to get it here cheaply. 



Now, to return from the digression. As I said, New England 

 was not much of a grain-growing region at any time. Many early 

 writers on American agriculture speak of its inferiority to the 

 colonies west and south of us. For illustration see ^^ American 

 Husbandry, containing an Account of the Soil, Climate, Produc- 

 tions, and Agriculture of North America," 2 vols., London, 1775; 

 pages I, 52, 75, 77, 97, 98, etc. Philadelphia and New York were 

 the great ports of shipments of American grains until long after 

 that. At the time of the American Revolution and before, agri- 

 culture furnished the principal articles of exportation from New 

 York and southward, while five-sixths of the New England exports 

 were fish; agriculture furnished less than one-sixth. But the 

 country grew enough grain to feed its people, and not only all 

 the field crops and nearly all the garden vegetables now grown, but 

 also flax, hemp, and a multitude of small crops now unknown here. 

 Remember that agriculture is perfectly adaptative; the people had 

 to be fed from the soil, because transportation of food for any 

 considerable proportion of the population from a distance, by the 

 methods then in use, was impossible. 



But there was an intelligent class on the farms; no part of the 

 Old World- had such a farming population, and farming in America 

 in those days was of necessity farming in a humble way. It was 

 just the population to intelligently adapt their agriculture to their 

 conditions, and to change it as fast as the conditions called for 

 change. The early settlers scratched the unwilling soil with the 



