FOR PROMOTING AGRICULTURE 105 



for the purpose only of looking at what the learned 

 call the stercorary, but which farmers know by the 

 name of the manure heap. Will our friends from the 

 city pardon us if we detain them a moment at this 

 point? Here we stop, the rather, because here, more 

 than anywhere else, the farmers of Massachusetts are 

 careless and deficient; because on this, more than on 

 anything else, depends the wealth of the farmer, and 

 because this is the best criterion of his present and the 

 surest pledge of his future success. What then is its 

 state? How is it located? Sometimes we see a barn- 

 yard on the top of a hill, with two or three rocks in the 

 centre, so that whatever is carried or left there is sure 

 of being chiefly exhaled by the sun or washed away by 

 the rain. Sometimes it is to be seen in the hollow of 

 a valley, into which all the hills and neighboring 

 buildings precipitate their waters. Of consequence all 

 its contents are drowned or water-soaked, or, what is 

 worse — there having been no care about the bottom 

 of the receptacle — its wealth goes off in the under 

 strata, to enrich, possibly, the antipodes. The Chinese, 

 for aught we know, may be the better for it, but it is 

 lost forever to these upper regions. 



Now all this is to the last degree wasteful, absurd 

 and impoverishing. Too much cannot be said to ex- 

 pose the loss and injury which the farmer thus sus- 

 tains. Let the farmer want whatever else he pleases; 

 but let no man call himself a farmer who suffers him- 

 self to want a receptacle for his manure, water-tight at 

 the bottom and covered at the top, so that below noth- 

 ing shall be lost by drainage, and above nothing be 

 carried away by evaporation. Let every farmer want- 

 ing such protection for his manure be assured that he 

 loses by the sun and rain ten-fold as much as will pay 

 all his taxes, state, town and national, every year. 



The speaker next discussed the topic of interior 

 fences in the arable or cultivated part of the farm and 



