164 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



others in this county, with the things of the same name, once 

 the best of the class; the tenants of these yards, stables and 

 sheds, with their ancestors ; the hog-pens and their five hundred 

 pound Suffolks, with the swordfish-nosed street scavenger of 

 olden times; the French, Spanish or Silesian merino, giving 

 more wool from his necklace and pantalets than flocks used to 

 give from the entire animal; the tillage of the soil and the 

 crops produced by this tillage, under the direction of the farmer 

 of the age, in comparison with those of other years ; and last 

 but by no means least, when you place the mind, the enlight- 

 ened, faithful, working mind, now devoted to the object, and 

 acting through the agricultural journals, the addresses and lec- 

 tures, the application of science to agriculture in the school and 

 in the field ; mind, investigating mind, pointing out the laws 

 of vegetable life and vegetable growth, showing the food best 

 fitted for tliat growth, and establishing the law of rotation for 

 crops in accordance with the law of growth, the mind thus de- 

 voted to the advancement of our cause, (and devoted mind is 

 the surest criterion of progress the world has yet discovered,) 

 in contrast with the mind thus devoted, only a quarter of a 

 century ago ; you will have the evidence of the progress made. 

 In the face of all the taunts at the snail-like pace with which 

 agricultural improvement is said to have advanced, we chal- 

 lenge the world to produce an equally rapid advancement in 

 any other department of life's duties. 



So great has been the change in the amount of an acre's 

 production, that we have been cautioned repeatedly against 

 reporting the full measure, lest we bring distrust on all our do- 

 ings. But here permit us to say, we have made no estimates. 

 We have examined hundreds of crops in the field, we have ex- 

 amined them thoroughly, honestly and faithfully, we have taken 

 into account the soil, the location, the tillage, the present crop 

 in comprison with that of the last year, and the prospects for 

 the future. In the corn-field, we have measured one rod care- 

 fully and accurately; so measured it that the adjoining rod on 

 either side should be as large and contain as many hills as the 

 one taken, and so measured it that it would require one hun- 

 dred and sixty such rods for an acre. We have designed to 

 take it, not from a manure heap, but a fair specimen of the bet- 



