forest mosses carpeted the ground ; and streams, long since \an- 

 ished or dwindled to a thread, sought the sea. The climate was 

 less capricious ; the beautiful Indian Summer flung its week f)f 

 misty gold into November's lap ; and even the Winter snows 

 were true to their appointment of advent or departure. The pi- 

 oneer's axe opened the soil to the sun, and his plough prepared 

 the way among the stumps for tlie grasses and grains of the old 

 world. It was inevitable that all should change, as it had done 

 in Europe and Asia so long before. The farmer here, as every- 

 where, was to pursue his toil in the face of difficulties of his own 

 creating. Thoreau, in his rough Walden bean-field, expressed 

 the general fact of Agriculture: "This was my curious labor all 

 summer — to make this portion of the earth's surface, which had 

 yielded only cinque-foil, blackberries, johnswort and the like be- 

 fore, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this 

 pulse, — to make the earth say beans instead of grass." This 

 struggle was complicated for our predecessors and for us by the 

 unsparing drafts which nature had to meet. 



No science can give back the past. That would be to surrend- 

 er the land to be the Indian's hunting-grounds again. But it can 

 and it must improve our agriculture by reviving such of the old 

 conditions as will put nature more in alliance with the farmer's 

 work. New England husbandry will never be exactly the same 

 as that of the rich plains behind the dykes of Holland or that 

 whose leaves are dewy with the warm vapors of an English sky. 

 But it will be the husbandry of a soil less sterile and more hos- 

 pitable in just the proportion that the farm goes to school to sci- 

 ence, and learns that even after years of neglect, nature may 

 still be recovered as a friend. A wise combination of intelli' 

 gence, under the direction of only what is certainly established 

 by science now, for the purpose of recovering some of the lost 

 values of climate and growth, would make any district — even 

 your own, so proud of its advanced culture — v'astly more pro- 

 B 



