Corn-Makers 217 



Observe its height, its breadth of verdure. That deep green 

 shows it to be replete with rich sap. . . ." 



And so into a sermon that his saintly grandsire would most 

 heartily have approved. 



With the same degree of serious intensity he presented his 

 readers with a problem in arithmetical progression which the 

 framers of the Agricultural Adjustment Act might well have 

 studied: "If a man has only sufficient good farm land to give 

 him the corn sufficient to feed one hog, let him raise the 

 hog and feed it. Its dung spread on the outworn fields will 

 manure the land to feed another hog, and so on . . ." until 

 he drew a picture of a land literally swarming with cornfed 

 swine. 



It was on such subjects as these that he wrote his long let- 

 ters to John Bartram, the king's gardener at Kew, and which 

 inspired Bartram's trip to and tour of the American colonies. 

 It was Bartram, one remembers, who discovered the giant 

 rhododendrons of the southern mountains and made these 

 known to the world. Jared Eliot's letters to that gentleman 

 farmer, Cadwallader Golden of the New York colony, were 

 forwarded by him to Linnaeus. So Europe became acquainted 

 with the Connecticut country physician of men's souls, bodies 

 and farms. The British Royal Agricultural Society honored 

 him with a fellowship the first ever conferred on an Amer- 

 ican. 



With President Clap of Yale, Eliot constructed an amaz- 

 ing piece of farm machinery which was drawn by two oxen 

 and which not only plowed a furrow, but dropped seed, and 

 fertilizer and covered these over as it moved clumsily across 

 the field. These experiments fathered Franklin's on his farm 

 near Bordentown, and Jefferson's at Monticello. They inspired 

 Washington's attempts to increase his crops of corn and 

 turnips at a saving of time and labor. Carefully, the ex-Com- 

 mander in Chief noted in his diary on a spring day in 1786: 



Having fixed a roller to the tail of my barrel plow and a brush 



