THE ROTATION OF THE FARM. 377 



the time when we can find the intermediate links that may unite 

 them into a series. 



And now let us continue faithful to the glorious traditions 

 which our great masters have bequeathed to us. The majority of 

 the students whose names are inscribed in the preceding congresses 

 were archaeologists. Lartet and Dessort, Vorso and Liche, Hoze- 

 dine and Clericci, Ouvarov and Romer, who remain the protecting 

 genius of our congress, have shown us how we must work. To 

 select an example, questions like that of the discovery of copper, 

 and of its value as a medium of exchange, ought to be problems 

 of the greatest interest to us. — Translated for The Popular Science 

 Monthly from the Revue Scientifique. 



THE ROTATION OF THE FARM. 



By APPLETON MORGAN. 



IT was an English maxim, as old as Harold, and it is probably 

 a safe one to-day, that "horses feel a famine first." The 

 meaning, of course, is that, in the commencement of a dearth of 

 cereals, the stables would be pillaged of the grains fed to the 

 horses by a hungry populace before it clamored to the authorities 

 for bread. 



They seem to have changed all that in Massachusetts. There 

 lies before me a pamphlet, issued by the authority of the Com- 

 monwealth of Massachusetts, entitled A Descriptive Catalogue of 

 Farms in Massachusetts, Abandoned or partially Abandoned (is- 

 sued under the provisions of chapter 280 of the Acts of 1891), by 

 William R. Sessions, Secretary of the State Board of Agriculture, 

 November, 1891. Certainly this is a startling head-line, and those 

 of us who had begun to have faith in modern methods, in agri- 

 cultural colleges, in the chemistry of crop rotation, by which the 

 element exhausted by the yield of one year should be supplied by 

 the next, confronted by it might begin to weaken as to the com- 

 pensations, and what had been supposed to be the eternal laws of 

 reciprocal affinities! Is it possible, we would perhaps find our- 

 selves asking, that the Massachusetts farmer, the nearest in the 

 Union in point of mileage to the two or three greatest of its mar- 

 kets, should " abandon " the fields of his ancestors ? That, after 

 generations of tillage, any tracts of agricultural land anywhere 

 are diverted to other utilities in the course of their prime func- 

 tion of supporting life is a familiar contingency. Lands once 

 agricultural may be covered by residences or factories as neigh- 

 boring towns spread out to include them. But absolute abandon- 

 ment would seem the rarest of possibilities, so long, at least, as 



