AGRICULTURE OF MASSACHUSETTS. 367 



from the West of articles the increased demand for which 

 we could not supply, or which could be brought to our doors 

 so cheaply that we could better afford to make other crops, 

 or raise other animals at such a profit as to warrant us in so 

 doing, and thus paying for tliese imported articles, — this is 

 not by any means to be taken as an evidence of poor farm- 

 ing, or a decline in our agriculture, which has not declined 

 in theory or in practice. Within the past half-century, 

 greater advance has been made in scientific and practical 

 agriculture than in any two hundred preceding years ; and 

 this has been the case in every department of science and of 

 art. 



Society has changed, and greater requirements are made 

 in every ramification of our lives ; and the ingenuity of man 

 has been taxed, and successfully, to meet them. Nowhere 

 does this manifest itself more forcibly than in our agricul- 

 tural operations. 



While these various reasons have operated to give so gen- 

 eral an impression that we are retrograding in our farming, 

 it is well to -remember that appearances, are proverbially 

 deceptive, and that often " things are not what they seem." 

 And we shall find this eminently true of the subject in hand, 

 and that the only way to get at the real condition of our 

 agriculture is to take the figures, as given in successive dec- 

 ades by United-States marshals and by our town assessors, 

 taken every five years alternately from 1840 to 1880 ; and 

 no exception can fairly be taken to these sworn returns, 

 which are the basis of our government expenditures, and 

 must be admitted to be authority. 



The valuations given below are taken from the assessors' 

 returns for 1845 and 1875, and are nearly enough correct for 

 our purposes ; the values of our farm-products being about 

 as much higher now than in 1875 as the difference between 

 gold and currency then. We are obliged to take these fig- 

 ures, because the Federal census gives only amounts, and 

 not values. 



Forty years ago we had of neat-cattle in this State 282,574 

 head, worth 15,439,549, while in 1880 our neat-cattle num- 

 bered only 261,121, — over 21,000 less than those of 1840; 

 but their value was $12,076,846, or $6,637,297 more than 

 those of 1840, which then averaged only 819.25 per head, 

 while the cattle of 1875 averaged $46.25 each. 



