604 SELECTIONS FROM ADDRESSES. 



like other things, require some attention after being planted, — 

 that cleanliness is about as essential to animals as good food, — 

 and that the fashion of glazing with old hats, goes out with 

 the rum bottle. 



The advance of our cultivation is often retarded by the in- 

 difference of the cultivator. There are to be found those who 

 scoff at book-farming as useless, maintain that there can be 

 no improvement in the management of the soil, and look at a 

 newly invented implement as an insult to their ancestors. 

 They would go on as the latter have done, not reflecting, that 

 if successive generations did not add something to the stock of 

 knowledge, we might get back to that patriarchal period when 

 the broadest branched tree was the best house, and red paint 

 the most fashionable garment ; when the economy of the 

 kitchen consisted in robbing the hoard of the squirrel, and the 

 ten fingers were the only tools that scratched the face of 

 mother earth. 



A blind reverence for the past, is the great stumbling block 

 of the present, and flagrant injustice to the future. Do as our 

 fathers did ! It is well we should, when we can do no better; 

 but man has been made a progressive creature, is endowed 

 with aspirations after excellence, has implanted in him a rest- 

 less energy that is continually urging him onward. He could 

 not stop if he would. He partakes of that law of motion 

 which governs all things, from the smallest particle of ani- 

 mated dust, up to the infinite worlds, which, cluster on cluster, 

 system within system, whirl in endless revolution round the 

 throne of God. 



The fanatic, who threw a stone at the Earl of Rosse's tel- 

 escope, because it pried into mysteries, intended, as he be- 

 lieved, to be concealed from human curiosity, was a type of 

 that conservatism which would have no new farming. It 

 would not encourage the undutiful longings of children, who 

 strive to know more than their parents. It would level the 

 schoolhouse, entertaining Jack Cade's opinion of men, "that 

 usually talk of a noun and a verb and such abominable words." 

 Of what use is education, but to engender self-conceit and en- 

 courage wasteful expenditure? Why buy volume on volume, 



