514 MASS. BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



attempting to improve too much land. Timber of much size- 

 as is well known, has become very scarce. In this part of the 

 State, woodland is, on an average, of more value than cleared, 

 or improved land ; and by appropriating a larger quantity of 

 our lands to the growth of wood, we should add to the value 

 of our farms. We cannot only do this, but we can devote such 

 parts of our farms as are too rocky, rough and uneven for the 

 plough or the scythe, to this purpose, or those which have be- 

 come poor and impoverished, and reserve the richest and best 

 for cultivation. 



The labor of this conversion is not great. Philosophers may 

 dispute, as they long have done, about the natural state of man, 

 but no intelligent observer can doubt that the growing of wood 

 is the natural state of the earth. Should this whole continent 

 be abandoned by civilized man, and left to the uncontrolled 

 but solitary operations of nature, we should again see its soil 

 return to its original fertility ; the waste places would be cov- 

 ered with vegetation ; the barren would become-prodactive, and 

 another Columbus, in some distant age, would behold its hills 

 and vallies and plains, covered with a dense forest and its sur- 

 face rich with the accumulations of ages ; tenanted by the wild 

 beast, and perhaps trodden here and there, as of old, by some 

 other race of men. who had wandered from the abodes of civil- 

 ized life and become lost in these boundless solitudes of the 

 western world. 



Thus we find the whole tendency of natural causes is, 

 through the growth and decay of vegetation and perpetual re- 

 production, to renovate the earth, and to co5perate with man 

 in adorning its surface with beauty and abundance. We have 

 but to take hints from these suggestions of nature, to learn the 

 course we should pursue in cultivating the soil. 



The only other particular to which your committee would 

 direct the attention of the board, is the fi.xct, that our agricul- 

 tural science is mostly of foreign origin, and the effect which 

 that has in retarding the progress of our own agriculture. We 

 need an agricultural science and art adapted to our own coun- 

 try. This country was settled, as we all know, principally by 

 emigrant husbandmen from England, They brought with 



