220 SELECTIONS FROM ADDRESSES. 



Second. These tables teach us that Nature has peculiarly 

 adapted this county for those bulky products which are most 

 appropriate for its position. While it is prolific in fruits, roots, 

 fuel, grass, and milk, its supplies of grain, corn, pork, wool, 

 butter, and cheese, (which admit of transportation from a distance, 

 for the product of acres may be compressed into a single car,) 

 are moderate in the extreme. Middlesex plies at least 400,000 

 spindles. She raises* not one pound of cotton. Her 4,428 sheep 

 would not supply her spindles with wool for a day, nor furnish 

 her population with one annual dinner of lamb, and another of 

 mutton. Her sheep, too, are annually diminishing, giving place 

 to milch cows and cultivation, and she must depend on the in- 

 terior for both wool and mutton, both indispensable to her com- 

 fort and prosperity. 



Third. With respect to bread-stuffs, Middlesex produces an- 

 nually but 427,000 bushels of wheat, corn, rye, oats, barley, and 

 buckwheat — not one third enough to supply her own population, 

 to say nothing of her adjacent markets. Her whole annual 

 production will barely suffice to give each horse in the county 

 half a peck of corn per day for his sustenance, and no generous 

 or judicious farmer can think of allowing less. Her annual 

 wheat crop, but 1,952 bushels, would provide but one treat of 

 dough-nuts for the good people of the county, and all the pork 

 we can afford to raise will scarcely suffice to fry them, and to 

 dress those fresh cod-fish, mackerel and halibut, which Provi- 

 dence has placed around our shores, but denied to the prolific 

 regions of the West. For pork and bread-stuffs, and I may add 

 for butter and cheese, as the railroads are converting all Middle- 

 sex into a milk-farm, the county is dependent on the remote 

 interior. 



Let us glance for a moment at a single county of the West, 

 about two thirds the size of this. The county of Genesee, N. 

 Y., by the census of 1840, exhibits 1,940,000 bushels grain and 

 corn, 154,000 sheep, and 49,000 swine. As a Middlesex farmer, 

 I see nothing to regret in this excess, or to tempt me to exchange 

 my acres in Middlesex for as many or more in Genesee. Na- 

 ture has bestowed different blessings on different sections of the 

 Union. If, at the West, she has placed her layers of limestone 



