308 AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 



mistaken form of woll-tlcvclopcd Bolfishneps. The possibility is, that out of a 

 family of three or live one may fulfil the desire of anxious parents, accept the 

 acres, and, with the homestead in prospect, settle down to be the stay of their 

 old age ; but the greater probability is, that as soon as legally free, Nature will 

 assert her claims in each, and they will go out into the world seeking for tlto 

 life that should have been theirs through early years of i^reparation for it ; but 

 Laving been cheated of that preparation, neither the world nor parents need 

 wonder if they come forth ill-developed, discontented spirits, seeking their 

 places and finding them not. 



As farmhig has heretofore been considered a business that any ignoramus 

 might engage in successfully, it has not been thought necessary to lighten or 

 brighten the labors of the form by any rays of science or gleams of intelli- 

 gence from the world of thought and action without. Work was the one 

 tiling wanted from sunrise till bedtime, and the physical nature, often over- 

 wrought, had neither strength nor sympathy to give to the mental, which of 

 course grew dwarfed and distorted in the unnatural atmosphere. Struggle 

 against it as they might with bits of candle and lighted firebrands in the chim- 

 ney corner, overwearied nature has been more than a match for fancy, philoso- 

 phy, and metaphysics; and where one boy with such culture has come forth a 

 perfect man, mentally, morally, and physically, nine hundred and ninety-nine 

 have proved unhappy foilures. 



Boys on the farm, as well as in college, have a future before them, and should 

 be educated in reference to the place in that future which their natural abilities 

 entitle them to fill. Parents Avho do not act upon this principle, but simply 

 drive their boys like horses or oxen to the plough, will find their farm improve- 

 ments paid for at a dear rate, and need not wonder at finding themselves 

 deserted and left to a lonely old age. 



The class of farmers now fast coming upon the stage are beginning to learn 

 that they must progress with the times, that they must admit science and intel 

 lect into their fields and barnyards where they want their boys to work, or the 

 boys will soon grow restless, performing their labor like so much mere 

 drudgery, and longing for their days of freedom when they can go out into 

 the world and be like other people ; and they will go, as generations past have 

 found to their sorrow, unless employment is given to the brains as well as 

 to the hands. Formerly it was not thought necessary for farmers to have 

 brains at all ; at least, it was not supposed that there Avas any necessity for 

 using them in connexion with farming operations. The main thing was to 

 work, and anybody with ordinary senses and two good stout hands could do 

 that. It all did very well, perhaps, in those quiet old times, when one 

 generation trudged on after another oblivious of the existence of elements in 

 water, earth, and air, that were waiting but the electric touch of science to 

 make them burst forth into the blaze of light, flash after flash of which haa 

 startled the agricultural world with new developments almost numberless 

 dming the past ten or twenty years. 



How obstinately the mass of those old-time farmers shut their eyes against 

 the light ! They had their hands and hoes and ploughs and oxen ; w^hat use 

 had they for brains or brain work in books or papers? They closed their, 

 doors against knowledge, .and put up their bars and padlocked their gates 

 against any threatened innovations of science. It Avas work they wanted of 

 the girls in the house, and work they wanted of the boys in the fields. And th 

 bays and girls did work, but they were listening and looking too — and think- 

 ing. Listening to the sounds of new life waking in the world without, looking 

 with great longing toward the distant and forbidden lights, and thinking, not 

 as they should have been taught to do, how they might kindle new fires on 

 their own hearthstones ; not how they might open the gates of prejudice to let 

 m something of the life that so tempted them from without; but only of the 



