FOR PROMOTING AGRICULTURE 21 



handle with facility the largest quantity of ashes, its 

 value as a fertilizer was unknown and its use confined 

 to the annual household leach. To plough shallow 

 was the only rule, lest the manure spread on the sur- 

 face (the moving of barns noted above being excep- 

 tional) should be carried below the reach of the roots 

 of corn and vine and there be soaked down to un- 

 known depths and lost. Neither neat cattle, horses or 

 swine could be said to be of any breed, being the 

 progeny of creatures brought by the first settlers, 

 originally good no doubt, according to the standard 

 of that early day, and still showing by chance here and 

 there a meritorious specimen. Cattle were left over 

 night in the pastures far into the autumn and some- 

 times were exposed to wintry blasts that they might 

 "toughen." The use of salt in curing hay, rotation in 

 crops, the ploughing in of green crops were unknown. 

 Fruit cultivation among the generality of farmers was 

 restricted pretty closely to the production of cider 

 apples. As late as 1823 the president of the Society 

 officially lamented that farmers still continued the 

 practice "of slicing up summer apples and suspending 

 them in front of the house to dry that they might have 

 a comparatively insipid and tasteless provision for 

 winter," and he declared that, "till every farmer can 

 lay up ten barrels of excellent winter apples, for his 

 own use, we shall not expect much progress in other 

 branches of gardening." 



Manifestly there was a field for missionary work 

 such as the new society proposed to engage in. They 

 had encouragement in the fact that important and 

 satisfactory results had followed from like endeavors 

 of recent date in foreign lands, but they had also the 

 discouragements which usually attend such work at 

 the start in the inertia of conservatism of that moss- 



