58 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



fostering care of civilized man. As man does not reach his 

 highest state in savage life, but only under the influences of 

 civilization, so the plants most useful to man show that they 

 were made for cultivation, since their excellences are developed 

 only under the conditions which civilized man can give to them. 

 Our finest fruits, our vegetal)les that render our gardens such 

 luxuries, our grains upon which we so much depend for food, 

 would, if transferred at once to a nation of savages, although 

 possessing the same soil that we possess, either die out, or, in a 

 few generations, the choice varieties would mainly disappear. 

 In other words, the fruits of the earth, which are the object of 

 agriculture, keep pace in their improvement with the improve- 

 ment of the human race, for which they were created. They 

 were not created to grow wild, like certain berries and fruits, 

 but they were made to be cultivated, and man was made to 

 cultivate them. We thus find this great agricultural truth 

 revealed in the very nature of these plants, and in the delight of 

 man in their cultivation ; which delight increases just in propor- 

 tion as he rises from the low plane of savage life to the higher 

 and still higher planes of civilization. We say then that we 

 have in the very law of vegetable growth and improvement, and 

 in the increased interest of man in the cultivation of the earth, 

 as he himself becomes more cultivated, the highest argument 

 that can be deduced from nature that agriculture is not only the 

 necessary employment of a portion of civilized men, but that it 

 fully meets their wants and capacities, and is worthy of the 

 highest civilized state. In other words, agriculture is divinely 

 appointed as a natural and honorable employment for man in 

 his highest state. And here we find another of those coinci- 

 dences between the teachings of Nature and Revelation. We 

 have in the Bible what claims to be a history of the creation and 

 early condition of the race. Adam, according to the Bible, was 

 not created a savage to live in caves and slowly to make his way 

 up to a higher life with stone hatchets and oyster-shell hoes. 

 He was not only created in the image of God, but he was placed 

 at once in surroundings worthy of so exalted a personage. 



^^And the Lord God planted a garden eastivard in Eden, and 

 there he put the man whom he had formed. 



^'^And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every 

 tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food; the tree of 



