12 PROSPECTS OF THIS STONY SURFACE. 



have gathered from their fields in other parts of the 

 same island, indicate that, within comparatively recent 

 periods, they have heen little better; while what England 

 has been may be inferred from the fact that, in an old- 

 farmed district in Northumberland, I have myself known 

 of six hundred cart-loads of trap boulders being raised 

 and carried out of a single field. I am less inclined, 

 therefore, than some may be to bewail as hopeless the 

 apparently unimproveable condition even of the stonier 

 parts of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The progress 

 of agriculture in such districts is necessarily slow, but 

 a thousand years will do for these countries infinitely 

 more than it has done for us. Productive fields and farms 

 have indeed already risen in many places from among 

 the rocks and stones around tlie city of Halifax. The 

 market it affords for produce, and the wealth from time 

 to time accumulated by its merchants, have had their 

 effect upon the surface; and gardens and fields and small 

 farms have gradually spread their cheerful surfaces along 

 the hilly slopes which skirt the beautiful bay. But where 

 and while such stony tracts occur, arable farming on a 

 large scale can never be carried on. It is not in this 

 neighbourhood, therefore, that the agricultural emigrant 

 is to look for those rural attractions which are to dispose 

 him to settle in Nova Scotia. 



One would scarcely expect that much should ever have 

 been done in such a locality for the general promotion 

 of North American agriculture. And yet I was much 

 interested to meet with a work published at Halifax in 

 1822, under the title of Letters of Agricola^ by John 

 Young, Esq. — the father, T believe, of the present Attor- 

 ney-General of the province — which, for sound knowledge 

 of the subject, both practical and scientific, for honest 

 common sense, and for a warm but prudent zeal to 

 improve the country in which he lived, is, as a whole, 

 superior to any other book of the time I have hitherto 



