394 SELECTIONS FROM ADDRESSES. 



corn as three hundred ought to cost, who does not see that both 

 he and the public lose all the benefit of one-third of his honest 

 industry. 



It can be demonstrated that the agriculturists of the United 

 States throw away, as they do the elements of bread and meat, 

 wool and cotton, more hard work than all the mechanics and 

 merchants, lawyers and doctors, perform ! What sensible man 

 does not see the importance to Massachusetts manufactures, 

 that the expense of producing human food be reduced to the 

 minimum, by greatly increasing the fertility of your land? 

 Whatever advantage other parts of the Union may have over 

 you in clieap living, rests on this basis. To attain signal suc- 

 cess in a general system of farm economy, you must have good 

 agricultural schools in connection with experimental farms. 

 Who among you can say from his own experience or reading, 

 how much corn the manure made by the consumption of fifty 

 bushels by cattle or swine, will add to two or three acres 

 planted in this crop ? Will one hundred pounds of grain yield 

 fertilizers enough to reproduce that quantity again ? or more ? 

 or less ? Who can inform me ? In every 1,000 pounds of 

 barn yard manure which you haul out and spread on a field, 

 there are, as a general thing, over 800 pounds of pure water ; 

 and of the other 200 pounds, about 187 pounds are nothing but 

 the elements of water combined with charcoal. Think of the 

 solemn nonsense of pitching with a fork 800 loads of water in 

 100 of wet straw, cornstalks and dung, hauling the water a 

 half mile or more, distributing it evenly over the ground, and 

 then carefully turning it under the sod with a plough ! There 

 is over 30 per cent, of water in manure. Tell me the reason 

 lohy a ton of Peruvian guano sells at from ^40 to $60, when a 

 like weight of good stable manure is dear at one-twentieth of 

 the money. When I see a man give 300 pounds of corn for 

 100 of manure to make corn again, as has been successfully 

 done this season, I feel great confidence in the power of sci- 

 ence to concentrate the essential food of cultivated plants into 

 a small compass. I have considerable faith that the day is not 

 distant when fifty pounds of the fertilizing elements in a bar- 

 rel of flour will produce, on fair soils, wheat enough to make 



