INTRODUCTION. 



" The sounds of active industry 



I love I love them all : 



The banging of the hammer, the whirring of the plane, 

 The crashing of the busy saw, the creaking of the crane." ANON. 



THE age has passed in which the hard-fisted cultivator of the 

 soil was looked upon as an illiterate plebeian, and the last beams 

 of its twilight are dancing about us. Our worthy grandfathers 

 taught their sons that, if they were able to read, intelligibly, the 

 Bible and the " Babes in the Woods," which usually constituted 

 their library, and could write a legible hand, and keep their debit 

 and credit so that no one could cheat them, they would have all 

 the education that would ever be of any practical advantage to 

 them in agricultural pursuits. Our fathers allowed us to exceed 

 the boundaries which restrained them, and permitted us to look 

 into geography, natural philosophy, a,nd chemistry, as applied to 

 agriculture ; and, after long importunity, allowed us to lay aside 

 those old Bull Plows, with wooden mold-boards, and those clumsy, 

 awkward, heavy, ill-shapen tools, for those which had been manu 

 factured of better materials,- and of forms more in accordance 

 with the most approved mechanical and philosophical principles. 

 Our forefathers were taught, and they inculcated the same pre 

 cept, that if a boy or man happened to be so unaccountably 

 stupid that he would not be likely to make a successful doctor, or 

 lawyer, or merchant, or mechanic, he must be a farmer ; but we 



