ELECTEICITY — UNDER-DEAINING. 15 



ing in obstruction and defeat, are constantly overstepped and trans- 

 figured by the men of genius and of prescience wliom God benig- 

 nantly sends to lead us on from achievement to achievement, from 

 triumph to triumph. To be conscious of a need or a deficiency, is to 

 be far on the way whereby we shall at last overcome it. Steam, as 

 a productive force, an industrial factor, is barely a century old ; 

 Electricity was harnessed to a wire and made a post-boy hardly 

 thirty years ago. I do not believe this all, nor even the best, that 

 this all-pervading, irresistible power is destined to do for us. I 

 believe that plants will yet be grown by its aid with a celerity never 

 yet attained ; that heat will be profitably produced and difiused by 

 its agency ; and that power will be generated from electric bat- 

 teries, of old or new device, which will supplement, if not in time 

 supersede, all other mechanical forces, liberating Man almost wholly 

 from obstruction and defeat by material obstacles, and rendering 

 Pi'oductive Industry a matter of application and oversight, rarely 

 or never taxing human sinews to achieve a result which invokes 

 the employment of material force. 



If I do not speak here of what, in my section, as in Europe, is 

 the basis of all thorovigh culture — I refer to Under-draining — it is 

 not becavise I deem it inapplicable to your State, but simply that 

 the time when it can be expected to command general attention 

 here has not yet arrived. You do not need to warm your soil, 

 lengthen your season of verdure, or hasten the growth and matur- 

 ing of your crops, as we do ; and there are but few square miles of 

 your State on which a net- work of under-drains three feet in average 

 depth and but three rods apart, would not cost more than it would 

 be worth. And yet, I have no doubt that many gardens, nurseries, 

 &c., in this State ought to be thus drained, and would be to profit, 

 if only to relieve them of an excessive moisture in Spring and early 

 Summer, remaining stagnant in and souring the soil. By-and-by, 

 you will begin to undei'-drain grain-fields and meadows as we do ; 

 but that topic can wait. The draining of bogs and marshes, by 

 widening, deepening, and straightening, the channels wherein water 

 now flows from them — often making new ones in part, if not wholly 

 — proflTers more obvious and instant advantages. The lands waiting 

 to be thus reclaimed are nearly always exceptionally fertile ; they 

 rarely present other obstacles to cultivation than water ; while their 

 proper drainage must contribute signally to the healthfulness of the 

 surrounding country. No State which embosoms extensive swamps 



