8 THE NEW AGRICULTURE. 



alone the condition of the soil as regarded temperature, but so 

 even and uniform was the flow of the waters, and so perfectly were 

 food and drink supplied to the tubers, food always in abundance 

 -and never in surfeit, that the effects of fungus, about that period de- 

 veloping infection of soils on both sides of the Atlantic, and that 

 very season reducing the potato crop to a point threatening extinc- 

 tion, did not touch our little patch of about a quarter of an acre, 

 and we harvested fully thirty bushels of potatoes in beauty of per- 

 fection. This was so much a matter of surprise to our neighbors, 

 that the ensuing spring they took to early planting as a remedy 

 for the blight; but nobody seemed to realize benefits from so doing, 

 since the season succeeding proved equally one of blight and 

 destruction, so far as the potato was concerned. 



That season, the last spent in Basswood Cottage, was the one at 

 date of which practically began the work of our discoveries. 



Though meeting Horace Greeley from time to time, from 1843 

 to 1861, counseling with and confiding in him as in none other among 

 public men of our country, it was not until the latter year that our 

 relations became those of intimate companionship. Though hon- 

 oring and esteeming Salmon P. Chase, Charles Sumner, William H. 

 Seward, Joshua R. Giddings, Gerrit Smith, James S. Wadsworth, 

 Abraham Lincoln and hundreds of others we might name, advising 

 with and confiding in them, Mr. Greeley was the only one we had 

 never found at fault on questions affecting the health and wealth 

 of earth's peoples. This deep thinking and profound moral and 

 political philosopher, a second Doctor Franklin, has had no equal 

 in our judgement among the public men of our country. 



John C. Fremont, the Pathfinder, had but little more than made 

 search for those passes over and through which, first the weary 

 wagon train, and since then long successions of steam cars have 

 coursed their iron way, linking ocean with ocean, when Horace 



