PROGRESS OF AGRICULTURE. 145 



indeed be a sad condition of things, when the capacity, and still 

 more the disposition, for improvement should cease. 



It is, and, as long as I can remember, it has been, common to 

 decry the farmers, as a stupid, ignorant, plodding race, satisfied 

 always to jog on in the steps of their fathers, and averse to any 

 improvements, such as are going forward in other departments of 

 industry. I think I may confidently deny the allegation ; and I 

 regard the reproach with the disdain which it merits. My own 

 observations, in England and the United States, lead me to the 

 conclusion, that, after making every just allowance for the neces 

 sary difference of circumstances in the different cases, there is as 

 much intelligence in regard to their art, and as strong a spirit of 

 improvement, with the agricultural as with any class in the com 

 munity ; and, more than that, the improvements, which have been 

 actually accomplished in the agricultural art, are in no respect 

 inferior to those which have been effected in manufactures and 

 commerce, or in the higher professions, if so we submit to call 

 them, which I confess I do with great reluctance, medicine 

 or law ; I would add theology, if I dared ; but I am afraid I 

 should get into hot water. 



In medicine, if under that head we include surgery, one can 

 not go through the streets of London, and observe, at the shop- 

 windows, the models of wooden legs, and artificial ears, and glass 

 eyes, and mineral teeth, and the promise of a new nose, where 

 the victim of misfortune has been deprived of his proboscis, 

 without acknowledging that the triumphs of the surgical art are 

 as brilliant as they are useful and humane. If one likewise 

 should place any reliance upon the numberless patent medicines 

 and nostrums which decorate the pages of the newspapers, he 

 would be led to infer that the reign of disease was broken up, 

 and the elixir of immortality at length discovered. But whoever 

 looks into the medical reports, and observes the variety of systems 

 and modes of practice which prevail, and which different col 

 leges of physicians seem to bring out as regularly, and in almost 

 equal numbers, as the good housewife s hens bring out their broods 

 in the spring, and especially reads the accounts of the various 

 experiments, to which, for the benefit of science, their patients 

 are unconsciously subjected, and by which, without the credit of 

 inclination or consent, they are made, at their own personal ex 

 pense, suffering, and peril, to contribute to the most philanthropic 

 13 



