GENERAL FACTS AND CONSIDERATIONS. 3 



laborers, whom he saw in the fields by the road-side, bat he had 

 [earned nothing from them.&quot; And another friend, whose emi 

 nent position in the community should have saved him from an 

 immature judgment, expressed an opinion that &quot; the climate of 

 England was so different from the United States, and the cost 

 of labor in England was so much less than in America, that the 

 agricultural practice arid experience of Great Britain could have 

 no application to the United States.&quot; Now, entertaining as I do 

 the high respect for these two gentlemen to which their intelli 

 gence and position in society entitle them, I have come, not 

 without some reluctance, to an entirely opposite conclusion a 

 conclusion which my own observation, in the course of my 

 progress, has daily more and more confirmed. 



There is a great deal to be learned in England, which can 

 scarcely be said to be known in the United States. There is a 

 great deal of agricultural practice in England, which may with 

 advantage be transplanted to America ; and although, as is most 

 obvious, every agricultural operation must be modified by the 

 climate of a country and various local circumstances, yet, in 

 respect to many facts of a practical nature, the knowledge that 

 under any circumstances a thing is practicable is often of great 

 importance, as it excites to inquiries and experiments which may 

 evolve many other valuable facts ; and inquiries and experiments 

 will often suggest modes of operation by which even the diffi 

 culties of climate and situation may be counteracted or over 

 come. Plants and animals are often naturalized to localities 

 very different and distant from their native homes. If the com 

 mon history of the plant be true, one of the most valuable and 

 nutritious of esculent vegetables, the potato, is an example of a 

 removal from a warm to a temperate, and even a cold climate: 

 and of a conversion from a root very inferior in size and quality, 

 to a vegetable most productive in its yield, universally relished, 

 in the highest degree farinaceous and nutritious, and, under the 

 best cultivation, perhaps yielding per acre as much food for man 

 or beast as any other plant which could occupy the ground. 

 Then, again, to suppose that a knowledge of the agriculture of 

 a country is to be acquired by a transit through it on the box- 

 seat of a coach, or in a railroad carriage, or by a casual conver 

 sation with laborers by the road-side, who, especially in England, 

 where labor is so much subdivided that the knowledge of a man 



