11 liSTRODUCTlOK. 



bountiful productions ; when it shall be our ambition to follow 

 the example of the first man in the nation, who does not think 

 an attention to husbandry degrading ; and when, instead of 

 being ashamed of their employment, our laborious farmers shall, 

 as a great writer says, " toss about their dung with an air of 

 majesty." 



Amidst the laudable efibrts that are now making to promote 

 so excellent a design as the revival of agriculture, the writer 

 of the following sheets is humbly attempting to throw in his 

 mite. He has been more prompted to engage in so arduous 

 an undertaking, by an opinion he has long entertained of the 

 need of a work of this kind, adapted to the state and circum** 

 stances of this country, than by any idea of his being thorough- 

 ly qualified to undertake it. 



European books on agriculture are sufficiently plenty in the 

 world, gome of which are extremely well written ; and this 

 country is not wholly unfurnished with them. Bwt they are 

 not perfectly adapted to a region so differently circumstanced. 

 Though the productions of English writers may be perused by 

 the judicious to great advantage, it would be unadvisable, and 

 perhaps ruinous, for our farmers to adopt the methods of cul- 

 ture in gross, which they recommend to their countrymen. 

 Local circumstances so widely differ in the two countries, that, 

 in many cases, the right management in the one must needs 

 be wrong in the other. Britain, being generally liable to too 

 much wetness, the English methods of culture must in many 

 respects be different from those of a region that is mostly an- 

 noyed, as ours is, with the opposite extremity of drought. 

 Difference of heat and cold must require a correspondent va- 

 riation in the suitable crops and management. Difference of 

 seasons and climates vary the fit times for sowing the same 

 kinds of seed ; and the manures that prove to be most profita- 

 ble in one country, cannot always be rationally expected to 

 prove so in another, although they were equally obtainable. 

 And though Americans speak the English language, yet the 

 diction peculiar to different farmers on the east and west 

 of the Atlantick, and the manner of their communicating their 

 ideas on husbandry are so little alike, as to render it highly 

 expedient that we should be instructed in it by our own coun- 

 trymen, rather than by strangers, if any among us can be found 

 capable of doing it in a tolerable degree. 



The writer confesses he has never had sufficient leisure to 

 attend very closely to the study of agriculture. But, having 

 always had a high relish for natural philosophy, and particu- 

 larly for this most profitable and important branch of it, he 



