MONTHLY JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURE. 



even beyond the hunter state, and tell us how God took the first man and put 

 him in a garden ; and then they would reconcile you to your profession by re- 

 counting how Emperors have condescended, once a year, to touch the handles 

 of the plow. 



Now, my friends, for my part, I have long been of Poor Richard's opinion, that 

 "a plowman on his feet is taller than an Emperor on his knees" — and would 

 not all rulers do more honor to themselves than to Agriculture, if they would 

 lead nations to honor the plow rather than the sword ? — if they would strew 

 the fields more with grain, rather than with blood i 



Instead, then, of lavishing, at this late day, unavailing and superfluous eulo- 

 gies on Agriculture — let rulers and orators rather teach us how its labor is to be 

 economized to meet the exigency of low prices — how it can be most effectually 

 protected, not only against insects injurious to grain and fruit — but against a 

 more pestiferous class of the suck-blood order — demagogues, assuming new forms 

 with every change of the political season ; stereotype law-makers, who flatter 

 and wheedle the farmer ; and parasites, who live on the fruits of his industry. 

 Let them show us what Governments can be made to do for the plow in return 

 for their enormous exactions from its produce for the benefit of other pursuits. But 

 I have said how much I should be pleased if I could sift from the mass of 

 floating theories and humbugs that infest the field of agricultural inquiry, 

 some practical facts and suggestions that might be useful to ofler you in re- 

 turn for the honor you have done me. And yet, as to mere practical details — 

 the quantity to sow, and the distance to plant ; how much grain can be gotten 

 from an acre, or butter from a cow, according as you stuff the one or the other — 

 the time, in my humble apprehension — thanks to the progress of agriculwrai 

 knowledge — has gone by for dwelling exclusively or chiefly on these. Such de- 

 tails were well enough when, more than a quarter of a century past, he who 

 now addresses you caused the first agricultural paper to be put forth, without 

 encouragement and in defiance of ridicule and predictions of failure ; but now 

 that, by means of many such and very able journals, we have accumulated a mass 

 of facts based on careful and repeated experiments, is it not time to begin to 

 combine and compare them, for the establishment of regular systems of practice, 

 •thus to rescue Agriculture from the reproach of empiricism, which justly at- 

 taches even to the most successful practice of every art when its principles are 

 not understood by those who follow it, so that it may be hereafter characterized 

 and followed as an intellectual profession, based, as well as any other, on sure 

 and certain laws? Shall we not begin now to encourage the young and in- 

 quiring agriculturist to go deeper into the subject ? What occasion have we, 

 for example, to go on descanting in set phrases for ever and for ever on the value 

 of manure and the more than miserly care with which every reflecting and saga- 

 cious farmer will hoard it up — not, like the miser, for the sordid pleasure of 

 contemplating it in the heap, but to distribute it, and that not too widely, but as 

 both should be distributed, with libcraliti/ and judgment ? 



The veriest tyro in the art of Agriculture— for it is a great art— may now be pre- 

 sumed to know that every crop subtracts from the soil a certain amount of ingre- 

 dients which are just as indispensable to the composition, growth and sustenance 

 of Indian corn, of wheat, of hoy and of oats, and all other crops, as these are, again, 

 to give strength to the ox, milkiness to the cow, and fatness to the hog ; and that 

 if you would save your land from exhaustion and barrenness, you must not fail to 

 restore, by some means, tliose ingredients when they have been thus subtracted 



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