222 EUROPEAN AGRICULTURE. 



advantages of competent teachers, and means and apparatus 

 adapted to their illustration. 



A competent knowledge of these branches should be consid 

 ered as almost indispensable in those persons who would under 

 take the cultivation of a farm, or the management of large 

 landed estates, either for themselves or others. It may be said 

 that the style of farming in the United States is so wholly 

 different from that in Great Britain, that, from the necessities 

 of the one, we can make no inferences as to the wants of the 

 other. I know that we have no class of land stewards, or 

 persons employed for the management of the estates of other 

 men ; that our farms are comparatively small ; and that a class 

 of tenant-farmers is scarcely known, among us. It appears to 

 me, however, that it is quite as important that a man should be 

 able himself to manage his own farm well, as that another man 

 should be qualified to manage it for him ; and that farms of a 

 moderate size, where the farmers depend upon their returns for 

 their support, have need of the greater appliances to render them 

 productive, and furnish, upon the whole, a better opportunity for 

 a successful agriculture, and for an agriculture of a highly 

 experimental and improved character, than farms of a very large 

 size, where the attention must be greatly divided, and the 

 management the mere daily routine of operations requires 

 the most incessant and absorbing care. 



But there are considerations, of a more general character, 

 which deserve attention. No one will pretend that agriculture, 

 even in the more improved form in which it is any where to be 

 found, has as yet approximated the perfection of the art. The 

 perfection of the art of agriculture is that in which the largest 

 amount of product is obtained at the least expense of labor and 

 manure, and with the least exhaustion to the land. Indeed, 

 there is reason to hope that we may presently reach a system of 

 cultivation in which, though the crops may be large, the land 

 itself shall not only not be exhausted, but be in a course of con 

 tinual amelioration. I know well there must be a limit ; but that 

 limit no one can yet define. We know already that crops with 

 large leaves, and therefore large powers of absorption, are com 

 monly improving crops ; and we know equally well that the 

 growth of a forest upon land, so far from exhausting, is, in fact, 



