216 Singing Valleys 



"I once owned that horse, and he remembers where I keep 

 my corn." 



Was it a horse's memory of corn, or fate, that carried Ben- 

 jamin Franklin of Philadelphia to the one man in all of 

 Connecticut best qualified to appreciate Franklin's extraor- 

 dinary genius, and whom Franklin himself could best appre- 

 ciate? Chance does not explain such happenings. The cross- 

 fertilization of men's minds is not accomplished by chance, 

 but by some law of chemical attraction which operates as 

 inevitably as the hungry silk draws the ripened pollen to its 

 need. 



The friendship of Franklin and Jared Eliot fired the imagi- 

 nation and the curiosity of each. Franklin shared with Eliot his 

 ideas for Poor Richard's Almanack. Eliot confided to Franklin 

 his plan to publish an Annual on agriculture and whatever 

 else might seem to him worth writing about. And Franklin, 

 with a gesture that only an author-publisher could appreciate, 

 immediately ordered fifty copies of the first number. 



Jared Eliot's essays, published annually by the author, were 

 the beginnings of American literature on the subject of hus- 

 bandry. His ideas ran from methods for extracting good "if 

 not the best iron ore from black sea sand" to hog feeding 

 and swamp drainage. With the urgent enthusiasm of a man 

 constantly in the saddle, he piled suggestions for feeding 

 horses on a half-and-half mixture of corn and oats steeped 

 together, on reports of his own experience in planting corn on 

 drained muck land and gathering harvests of from sixty to 

 eighty bushels per acre. He advised fertilizing the corn hill 

 with wood ashes. Already, in the first half of the eighteenth 

 century, Connecticut farmers were complaining that their 

 fields were exhausted. "Drain the swamps," Dr. Eliot pre- 

 scribed, "fertilize the outworn field. Rotate crops. . . . Corn 

 is hungry; it must be fed to live. But if you feed it it will keep 

 you and yours from want. . . ." "Look upon that plant in 

 blossom time," he wrote, turning preacher in the midst of 

 agricultural advice, "when it is in its full pomp and pride. 



