30 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



which a hard, rocky soil engenders ; with industry, produced by 

 surmounting difficulties; science, called in to supply natural 

 deficiencies. 



Not tliose who have the most means have accomplished the 

 greatest ends. The prisoner, who, with a knife and bit of box- 

 wood, made a perfect watch, accomplished more than he might 

 under less painful difficulties. Not that country with the finest 

 agricultural advantages, has produced the best farmers. The 

 South Sea Islander has but to stretch forth his hand, and the 

 overladen bough satisfies his wants. If the soil and climate do 

 all, men do nothing, like spoiled children of fortune.* Those 

 stones, useless as they seem to be, have called forth much 

 mechanical skill. The lever and fulcrum are thrown aside, and 

 powerful engines lift ponderous boulders from their bed of cen- 

 turies, upon which the plough-points have been blunted so 

 long. 



In pulverizing the soil, in exposing its particles to the action 

 of the elements, the agriculturist becomes a chemist. Whether 

 he knows it or not, he is a chemist, with the fields for his 

 crucible, the sun and winds for a furnace and blow-pipe. He 

 mixes the soil with ingredients in such proportions as the plants 

 he cultivates requires, trusting to the weather to form the proper 

 disintegrations and combinations. He feeds his plants as he 

 feeds his animals. A pigeon, fed on food in which there is no 

 phosphate of lime, dies ; its bones become too frail. The st *ks 

 of grain, grown on land where silicate of potash is wanting, 

 break down under the weight of their own ears. Oats grown 

 on sand treated with nitric acid, will not blossom ; and an oak 

 is dwarfed to the size of a fern by starvation. 



The soil of New England is stony ; but our ancestors reared 

 whole families on the stoniest of it. The plough of the son 

 glides smoothly through soil from which those double walls and 

 liuge moles of innumerable cobble-stones have been taken, at 

 the expense of the strength of the ancestor. Should we and 

 those who come after us, practice their patient industry, our 

 soil might get rid of the reputation of being stony. It is rough ; 

 but the Swiss peasants build like eagles on the heights of the 



* Liebig speaks of a place in Europe where the inhabitants live on milk and 

 sweet chestnuts; the capc in tlie production of wliich, is the cause of their 

 intellectual weakness. 



