AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION". 89 



why this superiority should not mvicli longer continue. Europe 

 is old, — America is young. Land has been cultivated for centu- 

 ries in Europe, and often by the same family ; its capacity tested, 

 its fitness or unfitness for particular crops proved, the local and 

 special effects of different fertilizers well known, and the expe- 

 rience of many generations has been preserved so as to be 

 equivalent to a like experience, in time and extent, by the 

 present occupants of the soil. 



In America there are no family estates nor long occupation 

 by the same family of the same spot. Cultivated lands have 

 changed hands as often as every twenty-five years from the 

 settlement of tlie country. The capacity of our soils to pro- 

 duce, when laboriously and systematically cultivated, has not 

 been ascertained ; there has been no accumulation of experience 

 by families, and but little by the public, and the effort, in many 

 sections, has been to draw as much as possible from the land 

 while little or nothing was returned to it. Farming, as a 

 whole, has not been a system of cultivation, which implies 

 improvement, but a process of exhaustion. It has been easier 

 for the farmer, though perhaps not as economical if all the 

 elements necessary to a correct opinion could be combined, to 

 exchange his worn-out lauds for fresh soils, than to adopt an 

 improving system of agriculture. The present has been con- 

 sulted, the future has been disregarded. As the half-civilized 

 hunters of the pampas of Buenos Ayres make indiscriminate 

 slaughter of the myriads of wild cattle that roam over the 

 unfenced prairies of the south, and preserve the hides only for 

 the commerce and comfort of the world, so we have clutched 

 from nature whatever was in sight or next at hand, regardless 

 of the actual and ultimate wrong to physical and vegetal)le 

 life ; and as the pioneers of a better civilization now gather up 

 the bones long neglected and bleaching under tropical suns and 

 tropical rains, and by the agency of trade, art and induf-try, 

 extort more wealth from them than was originally derived from 

 the living animals, so we shall find that worn-out lands, wlien 

 subjected to sTiilful, careful, scientific husbandry, are quite as 

 profitable as the virgin soils, that, from the day of the migra- 

 tion into the Connecticut Valley to the occupancy of the Mis- 

 souri and the Kansas, have proved so tempting to our ancestors 

 and to us. But there has been some philosophy, some justice 



12 



