208 SELECTIONS FROM ADDRESSES. 



But the fact that great improvement has been made, and is 

 making, is of more importance to our present purpose. Men 

 have found out, that, if he who plants an oak looks forward to 

 future ages and plants for posterity, he who plants a fruit-tree 

 does it for himself as well as for those who come after him ; 

 that, to graft an apple tree, is better than to suffer it to grow 

 wild ; that manures are quite as efficacious, when properly com- 

 posted, as when used fresh from the barn-yard ; that sixty 

 bushels of corn to the acre are more profitable than thirty ; that 

 to sow grass with grain in the spring, and have four-fifths of it 

 destroyed, is not so well as to sow it by itself in the autumn and 

 get two or three tons of hay to the acre the next season ; that 

 repeated, shallow skimmings of the surface-sowed soil is not good 

 ploughing ; and that, to pass a roller over fields sowed with grain 

 or grass, is better than to leave them in Indian hills. Some of 

 them have learned that gravelly knolls and sandy highlands are 

 not the only soils which pay for cultivation ; but that our rich 

 peat bottoms, covered with underbrush, weeds and water-grass, 

 which have been abandoned to the caprices of nature ever since 

 the ark rested on Mount Ararat, do in reality possess intrinsic 

 value. 



These deep meadows, which send forth from their dark 

 bosoms the chilling dampness of disease and death, adding to 

 the coldness and poverty of the adjoining highlands by their 

 unhealthy evaporations, seem to be so placed, by Him who made 

 the world, to say to man in stronger language than words, that 

 labor properly applied shall prove a blessing rather than a curse. 

 There they lie, side by side, scattered all over the county, the 

 bog exuberant with unwholesome vegetation, the highland with 

 its stinted growth of scanty herbage, both soils worthless and 

 unprofitable, but each of them rich in all the elements of fer- 

 tility which the other requires. Let the farmer do what a 

 benignant nature encourages him to do, and these poor soils of 

 New England which, under bleak influences, are fostered into a 

 sickly fertility, will be quickened into almost spontaneous luxu- 

 riance. 



But to enumerate all the improvements which have been made 

 in agriculture for the last half century would take too much 



