BY HON. NORMAN J. COLMAN, 



ST. LOUIS, MO. 



The sceptered king who sits in state, 



Or hero in red battle's shock, 

 Is not so worthy, not so great 



As he who plows and keeps the flock. 



THE first man was a farmer, or at least a gardener. The Adam 

 was an earth-man for such is the meaning of the word. If 

 we may trust the legend of Genesis he began his career in an 

 orchard. The first awakening of his consciousness and the first pleas- 

 urable excitement of his senses were under the fruit-bearing trees, 

 planted by those ancient rivers of water. The first toil to which his 

 bodily powers were given related to the earth and its natural products. 

 The hunter, with his bloody vocation, came afterwards ; and then the 

 merchant with his ships. It must ever remain an interesting fact that 

 in the ages most remote of human history, in an epoch long before the 

 Greek and Latin civilizations were planted in Southern Europe, even 

 before the hymns of the Vedas had been chanted in the valley of the 

 Indus, far back in the old Aryan homestead of primitive mankind, the 

 pursuits of our fathers were those of the field, the orchard, and the 

 garden. The smell of the new-broken soil, grateful and intoxicating 

 as the sea breezes of the Canaries, filled the nostrils of that undiseased 

 race of men whose descendants have civilized the world. Agriculture, 

 and not the chase or war, was the earliest, -as well as the noblest, voca- 

 tion of those ancient tribes from which the great races have derived 

 their strength and renown. The word plow is the same in all the pow- 

 erful languages sprung from the ancient and venerable fountain of 

 Aryan speech ; and the word art is derived from the old root ar, signi- 

 fying "to stir the soil." 



Many other pleasing trains of thought arise in the mind of him 

 who reflects on the dignity and poetry of that great fundamental calling 

 from which all other callings are but derivatives. Agriculture is a pur- 

 suit well calculated to cool and subdue the emotions and passions of 

 men long heated in the struggling marts of commerce and the red fur- 

 naces of war. 



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