ABOUT FRUITS, FLOWERS AND FARMING. 49 



animated corn and cob-crushers never mind, they yield, 

 on an average, three quarts of milk a-day ! and that milk 

 yields varieties of butter quite astonishing. 



His farm never grows any better, in many respects it gets 

 annually worse. After ten years work on a good soil, while 

 his neighbors have grown rich, he is just where he started, 

 only his house is dirtier, his fences more tottering, his soil 

 poorer, his pride and his ignorance greater. And when, at 

 last, he sells out to a Pennsylvanian that reads the Farmers 

 Cabinet, or to some New Yorker with his Cultivator packed 

 up carefully as if it were gold, or to a Yankee with his New 

 England Farmer, he goes off to Missouri, thanking Heaven 

 that he s not a book-farmer ! 



Unquestionably, there are two sides to this question, and 

 both of them extremes, and therefore both of them deficient 

 in science and in common sense. If men were made accord 

 ing to our notions, there should not be a silly one alive ; 

 but it is otherwise ordered, and there is no department of 

 human life in which we do not find weak and foolish men. 

 This is true of farming as much as of any other calling. 

 But no one dreams of setting down the vocation of agri 

 culture because, like every other, it has its proportion of 

 stupid men. 



Why then should agricultural writers, as a class, be sum 

 marily rejected because some of them are visionary? Are 

 we not to be allowed our share of fools as well as every 

 other department of life ? We insist on our rights. 



A book or a paper never proposes to take the place of a 

 farmer s judgment. Not to read at all is bad enough ; out 

 to read, and swallow everything without reflection, or dis 

 crimination, this is even worse. Such a one is not a book- 

 headed but a block-headed farmer. Papers are designed 

 to assist. Those who read them must select, modify, and 

 act according to their own native judgment. So used 

 papers answer a double purpose ; they convey a great 

 amount of valuable practical information, and then they stir 



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