6 MR. payson's address. 



sion — the ready answer which prejudice suggests to ignorance, — that 

 such a plan might answer Avith his Grace, but was too expensive for 

 him. 



But the fact that great improvement has been made and is ma- 

 hing, is of more importance to our present purpose. Men have 

 found out, that, if he who plants an oak, looks forward to future 

 ages and plants for posterity ; that he who plants a fruit-tree does it 

 for himself as well as for those who come after him ; to graft an apple 

 tree is better than to suffer it to grow wild ; that manures are quite 

 as efficacious when properly composted as when used fresh from the 

 barn-yard ; that sixty bushels of corn to the acre are more profitable 

 than thirty ; that to sow grass with grain in the spring and have four- 

 fifths of it destroyed, is not so well as to sow it by itself in the au- 

 tumn and get two or three tons of hay to the acre the next season ; 

 that repeated, shallow skimmings of the surface soil is not good 

 ploughing ; and that to pass a roller over fields sown with grain or 

 grass is better than to leave them in Indian hills. Some of them 

 have learned that gravelly knolls and sandy highlands are not the 

 only soils which pay for cultivation ; but that our rich peat bottoms, 

 covered with underbrush, weeds and water-grass, which have been 

 abandoned to the caprices of nature ever since the ark rested on 

 Mount Ararat, do in reality possess intrinsic value. 



These deep meadows, which send forth from their dark bosoms the 

 chilling dampness of disease and death, adding to the coldness and 

 poverty of the adjoining highlands, by their unhealthy evaporations, 

 seem to be so placed by him who made the world to say to man in 

 stronger language than words, that labor properly applied shall prove 

 a blessing rather than a curse. There they lie, side by side, scat- 

 tered all over the County, the bog exuberant with unwholes-ome 

 vegetation, the highland with its stinted growth of scanty herbage", 

 both soils worthless and unprofitable, but each of them rich in all 

 the elements of fertility which the other requires. Let the farmer 

 do what a benignant nature encourages him to do, and these poor 

 soils of New England which under bleak influences are fostered into a 

 sickly fertility, Avill be quickened into almost spontaneous luxuriance. 



But to enumerate all the im^irovements which have been made in 

 agriculture for the last half century would take too much time. One^ 

 not only an improvement in itself, but the basis of all other improve- 

 ments must not be omitted, and that is the diffusion of agricultural 



