Ihe JVgricultiuT of 



America. 



in $orth 



UR position in the world's main industry is assuming seve- 

 ral marked features. In the first place we are no longer a 

 dismembered country, and unbound by modern highways ; 

 the great civilizer of all nations, the railway, has brought 

 the Atlantic and Pacific within six days of each other, so 

 that produce at the foot of the Rocky Mountains can fairly 

 compete with that at Victoria, JB. Columbia, at Chicago, 

 Montreal, and at Halifax. Of all revolutions, this is the 

 most wonderful and far-reaching in commercial significance. 

 Next in importance is the application of machinery. What will follow 

 the self -reaper and binder, imagination can hardly picture, but this of it- 

 self is destined to place our sons at least on such independent ground as even 

 th'e manufacturers fail to estimate. It is not to be a Dalrymple farm only 

 that shall command their service, but even the ordinary farmer of Ontario 

 will walk out in the morning and return in the evening of one day, after 

 having cut and bound his fifteen or twenty acres with one man and two 

 horses. What a great cause there is in this for extensive possession of landed 

 property on the part of individuals, and possibly with the tendency to a 

 lazier, a less systematic, and a less remunerative system of cropping. 



Then, again, we are gradually drifting into a recognition of the claims of 

 agriculture as a part of national education. Its absence until recently in 

 nearly all systems of public education, anywhere, has been a curious in- 

 consistency, difficult to explain by men outside, and yet simple when put 

 to the men most interested. In conjunction with improved machinery, 

 and special lines of produce, the education of the farm will hold the lead- 

 ing men of advanced nations, as it did two thousand years ago. 



Thus, then, another phase of to-day farming is the keen scientific en- 

 quiry into things either not yet known, or so simple in themselves as to 

 bear doubt, and consequently requiring investigation. Fertilizers and 

 animal foods are examples of these ; their simplicity is in the hands of 

 the practical farmer, their complicated workings with the scientist, who is 



