STEAM IN AGRICULTURE. 2-13 



certain cases, but mainly because its adaptation to 

 this end has cost many thousands of dollars which its 

 disuse would render worthless. 



I am quite within bounds in estimating that nine- 

 tenths of all the material force employed by man in 

 Manufactures, Mechanics, and Navigation, is supplied 

 by Steam, and that this disproportion will be increas- 

 ed to ninety-nine hundredths before the close of this 

 century. 



For Agriculture, Steam has done very much, in the 

 transportation of crops and of fertilizers, but very 

 little in the preparation or cultivation of the soil. 

 Of steam-wagons for roads or fields, steam-plows for 

 pulverizing and deepening the soil, and steam-culti- 

 vators for keeping weeds down and rendering tillage 

 more efficient, we have had many heralded in san- 

 guine bulletins throughout the last forty years, but 

 I am not aware that one of them has fulfilled the san- 

 guine hopes of its author. Though a dozen Steam- 

 Plows have been invented in this country, and sev- 

 eral imported from Europe, I doubt that a single 

 square mile of our country's surface has been plowed 

 wholly by steam down to this hour. If it has, Louisi- 

 ana a State which one would not naturally expect 

 to find in the van of industrial progress has enjoyed 

 the benefit and earned the credit of the achievement. 



Of what Steam has yet accomplished in direct aid 

 of Agriculture, I have little to say, though in Great 

 Britain quite a number of steam-plows are actually 

 at work in the fields, and (I am assured) with fair sue- 



