14 



AGRICULTURE. 



score of years more of this wasteful culture 

 would have reduced the richest prairies to com- 

 parative barrenness. It had already covered 

 much of Maryland and the Atlantic slopes 

 of Virginia, North and South Carolina, and 

 Georgia, with worn-out farms, abandoned by 

 their owners, and grown up to stub cedars and 

 scraggy pines and junipers. But wiser coun- 

 sels have prevailed. Deep ploughing has been 

 substituted for scratching the surface, and marl, 

 lime, plaster of Paris, crushed and ground 

 bones, phosphate of lime, guano, muck, and the 

 liquid manures, have restored to fertility mil- 

 lions of acres which had become nearly worth- 

 less. The rotation of crops is becoming more 

 frequent, and the folly of relying wholly upon 

 a single crop is impressing itself upon, the minds 

 of the farmers. Raising stock for the butcher 

 and the tanner, the lowest form of agricultural 

 activity and that best adapted to a semi-civil- 

 ized people is and must be, from the necessities 

 of their position, the leading employment of the 

 farmers of some sections ; but there is a lauda- 

 ble ambition to combine, even in those districts, 

 with this, the higher processes of agriculture, 

 the culture of cereals and root crops, and the 

 cultivation of large and small fruits. There is 

 at the present time a passion for fruit-culture. 

 The almost numberless varieties of the apple, 

 pear, and peach, and the various kinds of cher- 

 ries, plums, quinces, and other popular fruits, 

 are sought after by tens of thousands of farm- 

 ers, and a good orchard is regarded as an abso- 

 lute necessity by every intelligent farmer. But 

 the small fruits are, after all, attracting the 

 greatest attention. "We have spoken in former 

 years of the rapid increase of the grape-culture. 

 This is assuming vast dimensions. Large vine- 

 yards have already been formed at one or two 

 points on Long Island, at lona and Croton 

 Point on the Hudson, at Hammondsport and 

 Pleasant Valley, in Southern New York, at Vine- 

 land, N. J., Pittsburg, Pa., Gibraltar and its 

 vicinity on Lake Erie, in Cincinnati and its 

 vicinity, in Eastern Tennessee, at several points 

 in Missouri, in Arkansas, in New Mexico, and 

 in almost every part of California. One nur- 

 sery-man advertises for sale 50,000,000 of 

 vines, and in addition to the numerous vine- 

 yards, every garden or city lot has from one to 

 a dozen vines. The culture of the strawberry 

 is becoming equally extensive. The multiplica- 

 tion of railroad facilities has largely extended 

 the area from which our great cities are supplied 

 with this delicious fruit, and New York now 

 draws its stock from Pittsburg, from Southern 

 New Jersey, and Maryland; and later in the 

 season, from Albany, Utica, Syracuse, and 

 Rochester, as well as from towns in Southwest- 

 ern New York ; Chicago is supplied from South- 

 ern Illinois by the Illinois Central Railroad, and 

 from Madison, Wisconsin, and other points in 

 Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, three and four 

 hundred miles away. The other large cities 

 draw their supplies from distances almost as 

 great. 



The cultivation of the raspberry and the 

 T>tacTcberry, introduced within the last ten or 

 fifteen years, is becoming more and more ex- 

 tensive year by year, and millions of these 

 plants are annually sold. MarTcet gardening, 

 or the cultivation of early varieties of Indian 

 corn, peas, beans, potatoes, tomatoes, cauli- 

 flowers, cabbages, kale, broccoli, -celery, etc., 

 etc., and putting them upon the market before 

 the general supply is ripe, has become a very 

 large and profitable business within a few years 

 past. It is specially profitable within an area 

 of from one hundred to three hundred miles of 

 the large cities, where railroad or steamboat 

 communication is easy ; but New York draws 

 its earliest supplies of these vegetables from 

 the Bermudas, then in succession from Florida, 

 Savannah, Ga., Wilmington, N. C., Norfolk, 

 Va., the eastern shore of Maryland, South 

 Jersey, Central and Eastern New Jersey, and 

 Central and Western Pennsylvania, Long Island, 

 and Westchester, Rockland, Dutchess and Put- 

 nam Counties. The " truck " farms are gener- 

 ally small, containing from eight to twenty or 

 twenty-five acres, and usually cultivate some 

 of the small fruits, and some of them also cher- 

 ries and peaches, as well as tlie vegetables. 

 They are constantly maintained in the highest 

 possible condition of fertility, and both solid 

 and liquid manures are applied without stint. 

 The yield per acre is often very large, $1,000, 

 $1,200, or even $1,500 worth of .gross products 

 being taken from a single acre. This high 

 culture would evidently permit a far denser 

 population to the square mile, if it could be 

 maintained, than is now found in any country 

 on the globe though Japan and China, by their 

 careful cultivation and manuring of all arable 

 lands, have sustained a much larger population 

 than any other countries. In the former coun- 

 try, all manures, liquid and solid, are most 

 carefully husbanded, and the same crops have 

 been grown on land for five hundred years or 

 more, without diminishing its fertility! 



In our country, this extraordinary progress 

 in agriculture is due in a great degree to the 

 rapid increase of agricultural knowledge, com- 

 municated by periodicals, newspapers, and valu- 

 able agricultural works. The American Agri- 

 culturist, with its circulation of almost two 

 hundred thousand copies, and other agricul- 

 tural and horticultural papers and periodicals 

 of great merit, though of less extended influ- 

 ence, have done much to educate our farmers, 

 market gardeners, and fruit culturists, to take 

 higher views of their calling; and have opened 

 the way for the formation of agricultural li- 

 braries private and public, in which valuable 

 treatises on special topics by practical men have 

 been introduced, and have stimulated their 

 readers to higher achievements in farming. 

 The demand for agricultural and horticultural 

 works has increased very rapidly within the 

 past four or five years. 



The most important agricultural works issued 

 the past year, have been :'" American Grape 



