1846.] Jlgriculture and other Pursuits. 149 



so much fewer than those of the waking period of the day. The 

 farmer, also, is ever in intimate communion with nature; and thus 

 an inquisitive and discriminating spirit is excited. The farmer 

 of experience likewise soon learns how much he may be aided by 

 a good education in his calling; and thus is he prompted to secure 

 such an education for his children. But above all, his active 

 habits give him so much physical vigor, that the old adage may 

 be applied to him: mens sana in corpore sano; a sound mind in 

 a sound body. He can sit down calmly to his books with little 

 of that nervous irritability and restlessness, and little of that 

 cloudiness and debility of intellect, that torment and retard so 

 many of sedentary habits. Those only can appreciate the value 

 of such a state of body and mind, who have had to struggle with 

 its opposite. If I may be allowed to give my own experience on 

 this subject, I would say, that decidedly the best time for study 

 which I have ever known — when the mind was the clearest and 

 the nerves most quiet — was the evening that succeeded a hard 

 day's work in hoeing or mowing. After having mowed an acre 

 of grass, I found my mind prepared to mow an acre of Geometry 

 or Astronomy; and often in subsequent days, when study was a 

 task, and there seemed to be a muffle over the mind, I have sigh- 

 ed for the return of that period, when the intellect had as keen an 

 edge by night, as the scythe had by day. 



In correspondence with these views, we find that primary 

 schools, as a general fact, are better sustained and better improv- 

 ed by an agricultural population than almost any other. So, too, 

 in New England at least (with the exception of professional and 

 literary men), reading is more common and more thorough in 

 such a community. And what is read, is better digested than 

 among classes of society who have less of calm leisure, and learn 

 the art of talking rather than of thinking. For fluency in con- 

 versation is often in the inverse ratio of the amount of ideas in 

 the mind ; and men often talk much, not because they are so full 

 of thoughts, but because they are destitute of them, just as a 

 stream bubbles most which has the least water in it. The farmer, 

 it may be, talks less and with less grace of manner; but bethinks 

 more, and with more logic. For these reasons, the sons of farm- 

 ers are peculiarly welcome at our higher literary institutions; al- 

 though the inquiry there is, not whether a youth originated from 

 this or that profession, but whether he has the determination and 

 ability to be a good scholar. Young men in crowded communi- 

 ties, under the influence of the strong social excitements which 

 exist there, sometimes acquire a precociousness of manners and 

 of intellect, that gives promise of more fruit than is ever realized; 

 but when the son of the farmer presents himself, we feel much 

 more sure, that, though the stone be just from the quarry, unhewn 



