OUR HOMES. 99 



manure) and expect to set out the plants about the 4th of 

 July. I do not know that we have ever had a failure. 



Mr. Williams. I understand you to mean by "new 

 land," land that has lain in grass ? 



Mr. Smith. Yes, lain in grass ; new to field crops. 



Adjourned to evening. 



Evening Session. 

 The meeting was called to order at 7.30 by Mr. Brooks, 

 who introduced as the lecturer Mr. W. L. Warner of Sun- 

 derland. 



OUR HOMES. 



BY W. L. WAKNER OF SUNDERLAND. 



Man's daily necessity is food, and in a state of civilization 

 it is largely drawn from the earth. We may conceive of a 

 time when men subsisted upon the fruits and vegetables 

 obtained with little exertion in the pleasant regions where 

 the human race is supposed to have originated. But, pre- 

 vious to the first record in which Cain appears as a "tiller 

 of the ground," all must be largely left to conjecture. 

 Egypt was undoubtedly the cradle of our civilization, and 

 was in a comparatively civilized state when Europe was in a 

 state of barbarism. From Egypt a knowledge of agricul- 

 ture extended to Greece, and we find it in a flourishing con- 

 dition a thousand years before the Christian Era. But the 

 Greeks took a deeper interest in other arts, and looked 

 contemptuously upon the tillers of the soil. They cared 

 much more for building up their cities than for cultivating 

 the land. Rome at this period was interested somewhat in 

 agriculture, and it is said that no greater praise could be 

 bestowed upon an ancient Roman than to call him a ' ' good 

 husbandman." From the downfall of the Roman Empire in 

 the fifth century to the sixteenth, we have no authentic 

 record of the progress of agriculture. We may look upon 

 the sixteenth century as the time when Europe awoke 

 from its long slumber. The invention of printing and the 



