76 YALE AGRICULTURAL LECTURES. 



young men, and already gives promise of doing much toward 

 bringing about the needed reform in our farm practice. 



Mr. Tucker commenced with some remarks upon the English 

 climate and soil. The former is such that while, on the one hand, 

 Indian corn will seldom ripen, and the pear, the peach, the tomato, 

 the melon, and cucumber, and%imilar fruits, require artificial heat 

 to effect their perfect development ; on the other, there is not 

 a month in the year when the plowman and his teams are not 

 actively at work. Of the soil, it had been said that while com 

 paratively little is really very good, one-thirteenth part resists 

 all attempts at cultivation, and two-thirds of the remainder is 

 so stubborn and ungrateful that it tries the skill and ingenuity 

 of the cultivator. He then spoke of the progress which Great 

 Britain has made during the last half century, in population and 

 wealth. A recent report of the Registrar-General showed that 

 the natural increase of the former now averages over one 

 thousand souls every twenty-four hours, while the growth of 

 the latter may be estimated from the computation published a 

 year or two since in London, that the grand aggregate profits 

 of English industry amount each year to two hundred and fifty 

 millions of dollars ($250,000,000). There is a national predi 

 lection among all classes of the people for country life a kind 

 of taste which it might be hoped that we should prove to have 

 inherited, when the fever of our younger life should make way 

 for more of the discrimination of cooler manhood a taste there 

 manifested not only by the attention with which men of wealth 

 regard horticultural embellishments, and the interest taken by 

 Parliament and the whole country in equestrian improvement, 

 including the races, and in sporting but also in the more prac 

 tical direction of actually increasing the productive pow r er of 

 the land. So important did this taste appear to Lavergne, the 

 French author, that he did not hesitate to pronounce it " the 

 chief cause of her [England's] agricultural wealth." Prince 

 Albert's farming was referred to as an example in point, as 



