AGRICULTURE AND THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS. 7 



which slides through the glebe with such easy guidance in your 

 ploughing match, carving and turning the curling sod without 

 a break, represents a five-fold gain in effectiveness over the 

 plough of eighty years ago. It represents, besides, an industry 

 more profitable and less laborious, the liberation of the mind 

 from the cramping bonds of an overworked physical fibre ; it 

 represents the farmer who is taught in the school, who reads, 

 and writes, and thinks, who owns his land, and makes the gov- 

 ernment. And depend upon it, this same human creature who 

 has dragged the plough, and held the plough, and driven the 

 oxen, will not rest content until he puts steam into the yoke, 

 seats himself on the plough's back, and ploughs the earth at 

 his ease. 



The mower of our day is the happy type of an age amelio- 

 rated by mechanical art. The portraiture of Time that fancy 

 gives us is out of date. Keep the hoiir-glass. We cannot get 

 rid of that. But picture him no longer as the gaunt old man 

 who has worn the flesh from off his bones in cutting swaths 

 with an old-fashioned scythe, but rather as the well-conditioned 

 farmer, mounted upon his chariot-machine, driving his team 

 afield through the falling grass, to the ringing music of the 

 clipping blades. ' 



Labor-saving machinery alone, however, cannot insure a 

 true progress in agriculture. That involves many elements. 

 Unlike the mechanical and manufacturing arts, the product of 

 agriculture is not a fabricated, but a natural one. It is a living 

 plant. Art here can only aid the vital organic force. It may 

 improve the species by mixture and by culture, it may multiply 

 the crop, but it cannot construct a plant out of its constituent 

 elements. The principles of vegetable growth upon which 

 agriculture depends, are among the subtlest, most veiled, and 

 intricate of the operations of nature. They lie in the shadowy 

 region that borders upon the thick, impenetrable darkness that 

 shrouds the mystery of life. That region, however, has been 

 explored, and the exploration has disclosed for the first time in 

 the history of the race, intelligible principles that inspire the 

 hope of an agriculture progressive and productive almost with- 

 out limit. The objection does not now apply which Lord Racon 

 brought against the works on agriculture to which he had 

 access. A large collection of them, which he owned, he caused 



