462 AGRICULTURE. 



cohorts, who now fled before the invading Goths. Truly Gold- 

 smith said : 



" Princes or kings may flourish or may fade, 

 A breath can make them as a breath has made ; 

 But a bold yeomanry, their country's pride, 

 When once destroyed, can never be supplied." 



General Washington, while "first in war," never "virtually 

 ceased," we are told by Irving, "to be the agriculturist. 

 Throughout all his campaigns he had kept himself informed of 

 the course of rural affairs at Mount Vernon. By means of 

 maps, on which every field was laid down and numbered, he 

 was enabled to give directions for their several cultivation, and 

 receive account of their several crops. No hurry of affairs pre- 

 vented a correspondence with his overseer or agent, and he ex- 

 acted weekly reports. Thus his rural were interwoven with his 

 military cares ; the agriculturist was mingled with the soldier ; 

 and those strong sympathies with the honest cultivators of the 

 soil, and that paternal care of their interests, to be noted through- 

 out his military career, may be ascribed, in a great measure, to 

 the sweetening influence of Mount Vernon." 



The deplorable condition of the agriculture of the republic 

 was not unnoticed by the "fathers of the country." Washing- 

 ton commenced making experiments on his farm at Mount 

 Vernon, and John Adams on his farm at Quincy, and Jefferson 

 on his estate at Monticello. Many of the reverend clergy made 

 their parsonage farms and glebe lands models to the counties 

 round, and there was a great demand for agricultural literature. 

 Mr. Jefferson also exercised his mechanical tastes in improving 

 the mould-board of plows, which he afterwards adapted to an 

 improved plow sent him by the Agricultural Society of the 

 Department of the Seine, in France. His son-in-law, Mr. Ran- 

 dolph, whom Mr. Jefferson thought the best farmer in Virginia, 

 invented a side-hill plow, adapted to the hilly regions of that 

 State. 



Mr. Jefferson advocated an adherence to scientific principles 

 in the construction of the plow. The first attempt to carry out 

 these suggestions was made by Robert Smith, of Pennsylvania, 

 who took out the first patent for the mould-board alone of a 

 plow. Peace spread her wings over the new republic, and her 



