2 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



Civilization must begin in breaking up the sod, planting the 

 seed, and providing better food. It may be unpoetical, but it 

 is not iinphilosophical to say, that man may be improved physi- 

 cally by improved and abundant food, as much as the straw- 

 berries that grow in your gardens, or the cattle in your barns. 

 It is impossible for a man to be good or great with a badly 

 organized brain and a weak or diseased body, and those depend 

 in a measure upon the food we eat. 



If the Digger Indian subsists on worms and roots, he will 

 partake of their nature. If the barbarian feeds upon that 

 which is watery and fibrous, having but little nutriment, he 

 will have no spare vitality, and the brain will remain an unde- 

 veloped germ. It is as true of man as of any living thing on 

 the earth, or over or under the earth, that for a full develop- 

 ment of his powers he needs abundant and generous food. 

 Our highest type of manhood is in tlie well fed nobility of Great 

 Britain ; physically they have no equals in the world ; and we 

 never think of wise and great men only as answering the his- 

 torical description of Plato, whose body and mind were well 

 developed. So we think of all the world's worthies down to 

 our Washington, and Franklin and Webster. For this perfec- 

 tion of manhood agriculture changes the poisonous South Amer- 

 ican root to the Chenango or the Jackson white potato ; it gives 

 the Baldwin for the crab apple, and the Bartlett for the choke 

 pear ; it transforms the small flinty and almost innutritious 

 Rocky Mountain corn to the golden staple of New England, 

 and the biltcr grass seed, which is the parent of the wheat, to 

 the staff of life ; while the diminutive sheep and hard sided 

 oxen it has doubled in weight and juiciness and value, in the 

 last two centuries. Everywhere it forces the eartli to bring 

 forth a hundred fold, so that man, no longer exhausted in 

 obtaining a precarious existence, awakes under the stimulus of 

 richer and warmer blood, and advances to higher thought and 

 action. 



The cultivation of any article of human consumption, to 

 increase its nutritiousness and its adaptation to the human 

 system, is so much done for the advancement of man ; and the 

 inti'oduction and naturalization of useful plants from other 

 lands is so much for the future development of the peoj)le at 

 home. Thus we find everywhere that the production and use 



