C. T. RUSSELL'S ADDRESS. 407 



gooseberry, and the grape are found to repay cultivation, and 

 are engrossing an appropriate share of it. Nurseries exist in 

 various parts of the State, and furnish a remunerating business 

 to their proprietors, while numerous periodicals and papers are 

 disseminating a true knowledge of budding, grafting, setting, 

 and pruning, as well as protecting the tree from noxious insects 

 and vermin. In a word, more fruit is cultivated, a better qual- 

 ity and greater varieties are selected, and a vastly increased 

 knowledge and skill are brought to its culture. 



I have no time, leaving cultivation, to dwell upon the great 

 improvement our age has witnessed in agricultural implements. 

 We are said to be more prolific than any nation upon the earth, 

 in the invention of these implements. And the records of our 

 patent office establish the fact. Many of these inventions are, 

 without doubt, useless. Still, many are of great value. The 

 straw cutter, the threshing machine, the horse rake, the modern 

 plough; are all marked improvements. Indeed, I have thought, 

 as I have looked at the latter instrument, in the symmetry and 

 proportions of our day, standing beside its predecessor of fifty 

 years ago, that the comparison of the two would be much like 

 that of a modern steamer, ploughing the Atlantic, with Ful- 

 ton's first boat, working its way up the Hudson, at three miles 

 an hour. But time admonishes me that I cannot discuss im- 

 provement, in this department, for a moment. By the Patent 

 report of 1847, two thousand and forty-three inventions, be- 

 longing to the class of agriculture, had been patented. To 

 enumerate but a limited number of these, churns and cheese 

 presses, currycombs and corn crushers, fruit gatherers and sau- 

 sage fillers, would be like regaling you on the index of the 

 Revised Statutes, or the consecutive pages of an agricultural 

 dictionary. The fact, however, that inventive genius spends 

 so much of its force upon this department, shows a demand for 

 improvement, and a desire to substitute, in every possible de- 

 gree, mechanical for manual labor. We have already realized 

 from it large savings of money and toil, and yet its results are 

 but partially developed. 



In the character and breeding of stock, especially for the dai- 

 ry and plough, I believe, on the whole, the last fifty years have 



