TEACH AS TO FARMING. 27 



and Natural History, and, in case of finding no guidance there, 

 I should have sowed one acre of my land bountifully with Salt ; 

 the next with Plaster ; the next perhaps with Nitre ; a fourth 

 with Potash ; and so on. using in all cases substances that I knew 

 would be paid for by future harvests, unless I had reason to be- 

 lieve something else would be more efficient. Thus, before one 

 week had elapsed, I would have found some caustic that grass- 

 hoppers could not abide ; and having found it, 1 would have ap- 

 plied it until the last cormorant among them had been driven into 

 the woods or turned over on his back. And this is the spirit in 

 which every such invasion should be met and overcome. Had 

 the farmers of any township promptly met, when the ravage 

 first became serious, and agreed that one of them would try one 

 possible antidote and another another, according as they happened 

 respectively to have the material at command, and met again a few 

 evenings later to compare notes on the results of their several 

 experiments, they could not have failed to discover an efficient 

 remedy within the first work. But they did nothing; and hence 

 many of their farms are a desert, their Fall crops next to nothing, 

 and half their cattle must be sold or killed for want of food. 



Our farmers generally think and work better out of their own 

 vocation than in it. A distant and towering evil arouses their 

 hostility and evokes their energy much more readily than one of 

 a less imposing but more mischievous character which assails 

 them in their homes. Let the word go forth, "An army of in- 

 vaders have landed !" and tens of thousands snatch instinctively 

 their muskets and take the road ; but here are armies all around 

 them who are plundering them worse than any invaders would, 

 yet hardly attract their notice. The Hessians who were hired to 

 subjugate our fathers had no rest for their feet until the last of 

 them was killed, captured or hunted home, more than seventy 

 years ago; yet their attendant parasite, the Hessian Fly, has been 

 plundering us ever since without resistance, and is now as formida- 

 ble and destructive as ever. I cannot believe flies more difficult 

 to conquer than men, if we would but fairly set about it. 



VII. And here let me retrace my steps to illustrate a point in 



