80 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



ure extentlecl to agriculture. 1 am or rather 1 once was a good 

 gardener — when I cultivated my own garden ; but when I became 

 so busy as to find it necessary to give directions to a gardener, 

 rather than to do the pleasant work myself, my garden gradu- 

 ally deteriorated ; and now, when it has become appareutl}' one 

 of the obnoxious necessities of life to leave a pleasant country 

 place and to go to the seaside in the middle of the gardening 

 season, my last opportunity for practising horticulture has almost 

 entirely ceased. 



The direction in which the production of food is or should be 

 tending is toward horticulture, rather than toward agriculture, — to 

 the intensive, rather than to the extensive, s3-stem of production. 

 If the tendency to horticulture or to the methods of horticulture 

 shall help to substitute the use of the products of the garden, — 

 vegetables and fruit, — for a part of the enormous consumption of 

 meat, and especially of fat, I doubt not the benefit will be two-fold. 



With this tendency to the intensive system of cultivation is 

 coming, or has come, the necessity for treating the soil as a labo- 

 ratory, rather than as a mine. 



So far as I have been able to watch the progress of science in its 

 application to the production of food, the principal attention 

 seems first to have been given to the assumed natural fertility of 

 the soil, rather than to its capacity to become fertile under intelli- 

 gent treatment. It may be observed, by the vvay, that this method 

 of treating the subject and of depending so much on tlie original 

 fertility of land has led to what I believe to be some very serious 

 errors in the science of political economy ; for instance, to the 

 temporary adoption of the theory propounded by Malthus, that 

 population tends to increase more rapidly than the means of sub- 

 sistence. This dogma was published something less thau a cen- 

 tury ago; since that date, whatever may come in the future, the 

 means of siibsisteuce have increased in vastly greater measure 

 than the population of the world ; while modern science applied 

 to the art of distribution has rendered the world almost a unit in 

 its possil)ility of enjoying the abundant production of each and 

 every section. 



When Malthus propounded this dogma, the value of a bushel 

 of wheat was exhausted in from a hundred to a hundred and 

 fifty miles of transportation even whore there were good highways; 

 today wheat is carried by millions of bushels more than half way 



