REVIEW. 



"Notes ox North America, Jlgricultural, Economical and Social," by Professor 



Johnston. Edinburgh and London, 1851. 

 It has ever been the fortune of the people of the United States, to be patronised by an 

 itinerating race of English, Scotch, or Irish travelers, who, in " a laudable spirit of inqui- 

 ry," come over among us, as they themselves asserted, " to judge candidly, and without 

 prejudice, of our people and their institutions;" and after receiving the hospitalities and 

 attentions of those to whom they had condescended an acquaintance, and fatigued with 

 their exactions, to return home, and most heartily, and with a right good will, abuse us, al- 

 ways in general, and quite frequently, in particular, in a written book of travels. It were 

 bootless either to classify or name the shoal of scribblers running down the catalogue, from 

 " Tommy Moore, the Irish Rhj^mster," to Charles Dickens, of " International 

 Copy-right" notoriety — all equally celebrated, if not in the literary merit of the books 

 themselves, yet altogether so for the kind temper and generous motives of their philan- 

 thropic labors! 



The literar}"^ foreigner has threaded our country to ascertain " who reads an American 

 book.'" — the politician and pamphleteer, to earn his pension at home, in the noble object 

 of spying out the nakedness of the land in our lack of institutions " time honored in Old 

 England;" — a vulgar, gossipping old woman, to gather material for a lively and scan- 

 dalous book; — and a clever, termigant play-actress, to get a rich husband, and " kick up a 

 fuss generally," — which in one way or other they have managed to accomplish, no doubt 

 with singular satisfaction to themselves, and the exceeding joy of sundry among their 

 equally honest and self-satisfied cbuntr}'- people at home. 



Such travelers wer'^Qhiefly of the common line; traveling to write, and writing to pay. 

 But we have now to notice one of another kind, ostensibhj a traveler in the way of his 

 profession. Agriculture and her sister arts, within the last twenty years, have attracted 

 a larger share of the public attention than formerly, in a great portion of the United 

 States, as partaking in the general progress of the day; and among the British authori- 

 ties which our inquiring cultivators have sought to instruct them in their labors, and aid 

 in their investigations, the published writings of a Scotch Professor — Johnston by name — 

 in a small Chemico-Agricultural department of a university, so styled, in the city of Dur- 

 ham, have been consulted. Awakened to a notion that where a plausible book had made 

 some impression for our benefit, the author of that book could make a more emphatic im- 

 pression by his own presence, the managing department of the New-York State Agricul- 

 tural Society, extended, some three years since, a sort of invitation, or hint, to the af/^re- 

 said Professor, that he should come over to the United States and deliver a course of lec- 

 tures on " Chemistry as applied to Agriculture," for a compensation, whic^, after a suffi- 

 cient amount of professional coquetry on his ow^n part, he accepted. In due time, therefore, 

 it became known that in the month of August, of the year 1840, •' James F. W. John- 

 ston, M. A., F. R. S. S. L. E., & F. G. S., 0. S., &c. Reader of Chemistry and Mine- 

 ralogy in the University of Durham" — we quote the title page of his book — 'arrived at 

 Halifax, and spending some time in the Provinces of Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, 

 in four weeks thereafter entered the United States, and arrived in the city of Syracuse, in 

 the state of New-York, on the 11th day of September; and on the 13th, at the great an- 

 nual Fair and Cattle Show of the New-York State Agricultural Society, " at three P. M., 



