98 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



that the seeds they possessed enabled them to go: and the maize and 

 pumpkins and gourds and watermelons and beans then cultivated, when 

 the white man found them here, were the products of a soil long tilled for 

 the same crops. In these wondrous people, the visitant to our shores found 

 the rude fisheries or the barter in furs with foreign vessels concomitant with 

 the agricultural pursuits, and hunting and field culture afforded sustenance 

 for winter, or for seasons when food could not be readily obtained elsewhere. 

 It requires no great amount of learning, or reading, or of original experi- 

 ment, to simply till the fields, or to cut down the forests for the first crops : 

 and " labor is found to overcome all things" mainly in general farming. 

 Some remnants of this tendency to barbarism yet exist — happily fading 

 away — where the rudest implements of labor and the most improvident care 

 of seeds and of crops show that the old well beaten path of husbandry is 

 the one considered the safest and the best. 



Since the attention has been directed to the establishment of agricultural 

 societies, we have seen most rapid and astonishing improvement in all 

 sorts of earth labor. But in proportion as labor is saved by labor-doing 

 machinery, the area of such labor diminishes. Once, and not long since, 

 every farmer's pride was to accumulate money to buy every lot and piece 

 of land adjoining his farm ; now he contracts his fences and narrows his 

 domains. His farm henceforth assumes the artistic and civilized aspect, 

 and his barns and outbuildings, his orchards and meadows, are in character 

 with his improved tastes. He learns to respect a tree, not so much as for- 

 merly for the cords of wood it contains, as for its shade and beauty and 

 pleasant memories. A thousand dollars' worth of barrelled fruits of the 

 orchard is better to him than the expressed juice from the cider press, col- 

 lected from trees scattered far and wide over his pastures and lots. Drain- 

 age and cultivation do more for an acre of fresh meadow or peaty swamp 

 than the product of five acres Avould naturally yield. And thus, ere he is 

 aware, he grows out of the most hard working and-toiling field husband- 

 man into the cultivator, into the horticulturist as it were, his wider do- 

 mains being only the vegetable and fruit garden on a grander scale. He 

 is none the less practical, though more appreciative of the value of the 

 right kind of practice ; none the less laborious, though more elective and 

 refined. In the vicinity to a good market, he even becomes more of the 

 horticulturist still. And his early crops, requiring the hotbed and the 

 sunny aspects of some favorable site, yield him more on an acre or two 

 than a whole farm formerly could afford. 



The agricultural farmer still is liable to a disadvantage, which, to a con- 

 siderable extent, the horticulturist avoids. Societies for the promotion of 

 horticulture avail themselves -of the advantages of science, especially of 

 the application of the natural sciences, to their avocations to a greater ex- 

 tent than do those devoted to the interests of agriculture, or wider field 

 labor. Mechanics, with her wonderful contrivances, remove much of the 

 drudgery and severe toil from the farm ; but how little is yet understood of 

 the habits and economy of birds, insects, and seeds, of fruits and trees, of 

 shrubs and flowers, and of the thousand wonders of which the Creator has 



