32 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



upon the schools and colleges, to which we send our boys to 

 learn things their fathers never dreamed of, that they will be 

 satisfied to be fitted to the old time grooves, to accept convic- 

 tions a half century old, or to settle down contentedly to the 

 raising of a dull routine of crops in regular rotation, and for no 

 particular reason, save that their fathers and grandfathers did 

 the same before them. 



It seems to me that the discovery and application of steam to 

 locomotion and transportation has imparted to the age some- 

 thing of its own fastness and rapidity, and that even as the 

 employment of this tremendous agent in mechanics has revolu- 

 tionized all mechanism, so the swiftness which it has somehow 

 imparted as a characteristic feature to the age, has rendered 

 necessary to the farmer, as to others, new modes of thinking and 

 acting, new methods and new manners. 



I believe that the New England farmer of the future must be 

 a very different man from the New England farmer of the past, 

 in order to do the work that the future calls for, as well as it 

 has been done in the past ; that the keen, shrewd, hard-working 

 man of instinct, guess and observation must give way to the 

 man of system, science and exact knowledge ; that in short, 

 agriculture in the near future is to be conducted upon the same 

 principles, and governed by the same rules which underlie and 

 control all other business interests. Pardon me, if, in this 

 belief, and actuated by a desire to be of such use as I might, 

 in speeding a change which seems to me inevitable and neces- 

 sary, I have seemed too freely to offer advice and suggestions to 

 men of capacity and intelligence, fully equal, if not superior to 

 my own. 



