EUROPEAN AGRICULTURE. 



FOURTH REPORT. 



XLVL GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS. 



THE great incentive to all agricultural improvement is profit. 

 The man who is satisfied with a bare subsistence will do little 

 towards making his condition better. It is one of the prominent 

 blessings of civilization, that it multiplies human wants and 

 desires to such a degree as to call out all the powers of the body 

 and mind to supply them. In proportion as civilization is 

 advanced, human wants increase. From necessities we proceed 

 to indulgences, from indulgences to luxuries ; until what were 

 at first indulgences and luxuries become themselves transformed 

 into necessities. Out of these spring other indulgences and 

 other luxuries, which go on by a sort of reduplication or spon 

 taneous generation, to which as yet no limits have been reached, 

 and we have reason to think that none are very near. When 

 one class or species fails, or passes away, others come into its 

 place, like sprouts springing from the living stump of a tree 

 which has been cut down ; or like the countless plants which 

 come up where a single plant has been suffered to ripen and tc 

 shed its seed. 



Besides this effect of use or indulgence in increasing, and in 

 giving an insatiableness to, human wants, there is an original and 

 native element of the human mind, which the phrenologists 

 designate as acquisitiveness, or a desire to obtain. This, when 

 joined with secretiveness, becomes a desire to keep or to accumu- 



