14 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



products of all time, and so imperil man and his dominion, is it 

 not a sin against the creation, is it not a forbidden thing, as 

 truly as though the injunction had been graven on the tables of 

 stone, and thundered from Sinai with the commandment, " Thou 

 shalt not steal ?" 



Let an advancing morality teach our duty to the soil. It is 

 but lately that the dumb and helpless brute was protected from 

 the cruelty of man by the penalties of the criminal code. Let 

 the appeal of a starved and emaciated soil touch the instructed 

 conscience of civilized humanity. But whether the duty be 

 recognized or not, the infraction of the law will bring its direful 

 penalty. 



In the light of these considerations, it is not with unmixed 

 satisfaction that we regard the progress of mechanical triumphs 

 over the soil. We welcome, at a time when all the resources of 

 the nation are needed, the accession of fifty million acres to the 

 productive land of the country, that was made in the ten years 

 of the last census ; and we rejoice in an increase of agricultural 

 product, greatly outrunning the increase of population, accom- 

 plished by means of improved agricultural implements and 

 thousands of miles of additional railroad. But it is important, 

 in connection with the consideration of the conditions of a per- 

 manently prosperous agriculture, to call attention to the fact 

 that these tremendous mechanical agencies, whose aggregate 

 effect is so astounding, are so many mechanical advantages in 

 accelerating the process of exhaustion. Using these powerful 

 appliances, you pump the waters from the well no longer by 

 hand, but with a steam-engine. The greater the yearly crop 

 gathered, the greater the drain upon the fertilizing elements of 

 the soil, and the sooner their limit is reached ; the more impor- 

 tant, too, it becomes to find some counteractive tendency, which 

 shall restore the equilibrium so injuriously disturbed by the 

 deportations of the harvest. 



Let the processes of nature, ordained by that wisdom that 

 was at the foundation of the world, direct our inquiry. Through- 

 out her infinite domain to the remotest star, not an atom of 

 matter, not a throb of force, even to the faintest vibration that 

 pulsates in a ray of light is ever lost. The thunder that shakes 

 the firmament, the lightning that rends the rock, the tornado 

 that prostrates the forest, the convulsion that rocks the earth 



