400 MISSOURI STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



good fat cattle for the butcher, and a manure-heap of such proportions 

 as would have given him a great opportunity of successful culture if 

 he had had the right land upon which to use it. 



Many similar examples will occur to country readers. Whenever 

 in the United States we see a truly prosperous and enviable farmer, 

 we find that he owes his prosperity to some special production which 

 his locality specially favors. He need not, as our southren planters 

 formerly did, to their great injury, neglect to produce his own supplies, 

 but he concentrates his best faculties and bases his career upon a 

 specialty. Consider, for example, the splendid results which have been 

 attained by the nurserymen and seed-growers of New York, Pennsyl- 

 vania, Connecticut and New Jersey. One of the wonders of the State 

 of New York, which so abounds in wonderful objects, is the great nur- 

 sery farm of Elwanger & Barry, near Rochester, who count their acres 

 by the thousand, their workpeople by the hundred and their annual 

 product by the hundred thousand. Anyone who visits that part of the 

 State without viewing this superb establishment misses one of the 

 most beautiful and interesting exhibitions of victorious industry which 

 the new world affords. Its two founders began operations there forty 

 or fifty years ago, one a German, the other an Irishman, whose only 

 capital was knowledge, intelligence and resolution. They have not 

 only succeeded themselves, but their example has filled all that region 

 with thriving nurserymen and seed-growers. If any one doubts that 

 agriculture in the United States is a fit profession for the most am- 

 bitious and advanced intelligence, his doubts will be dispelled by a few 

 days' careful inspection of the nurseries about Rochester and Geneva. 



New York people all know something about Oyster bay asparagus, 

 which for many years commanded double the price of the ordinary 

 kind, and was worthy it. Asparagus, unless we happen to be eating it 

 at the moment we should naturally think of as a minor product of the 

 soil, is a trivial thing, the season of which scarcely lasts a month. 

 Nevertheless, Oyster bay asparagus has afforded for many years a solid 

 basis of prosperity to a considerable community of Long Island farm- 

 ers. Some families have grown rich by raising it ; many do well sell- 

 ing and transporting it; and now by the process of canning the busi- 

 ness is rendered still more stable and lucrative. Delicate as this 

 vegetable is, it yields itself readily to the preserving process, and com- 

 mands a high price in many distant markets. 



Let us bear in mind, also, that those Long Islanders who devel- 

 oped the business of asparagus half a century ago had no such mar- 

 ket as their successors now enjoy. Ladies who went to market fifty 



