H. K. OLIVER'S ADDRESS. 575 



that is, winnowing by a machine, which, " instead of waiting 

 for whatever dispensation of wind Providence was pleased to 

 send upon the sheeling-hill," as honest and simple old Mause 

 argued in "Old Mortality," raised it by the human means of 

 pulleys and fans, and did the business of separating the chaff 

 from the wheat in a better, quicker, and cheaper way. What 

 more would you have? Yet the use of a winnowing machine 

 was obstinately opposed by the farmers of Scotland, where it 

 first appeared, and was denounced from the pulpit as a devil- 

 ish and presumptuous invention of the arch enemy of souls. 

 And this same obstinacy of prejudice, and stolid sticking to 

 old habits, are not yet dead, though they must eventually fade 

 out before the light, the spirit and the progress of the age. If 

 nothing new is as good as the old, and the old was well enough 

 as it was, why then, use your fingers instead of a fork to put 

 your meat into your mouth ; use a piece of bark for a plate; — 

 use the camel, the ass, the mule, — for all purposes of vicarious 

 locomotion, and put away your hissing-hot and thundering 

 iron-horse with his hurricane speed, and his shrieking, deafen- 

 ing whistle. None of you believe in any such nonsense ; and 

 if improvements in these things meet your approbation, and 

 you would never consent that the world should be without 

 them, why will you not use the same candor of judgment, in 

 relation to novelties, either of implement or of operation, in 

 your own calling? 



Do not misunderstand me, and go away with the impression 

 that, since I commend to you the new and the progressive, I 

 have a low opinion of all the old of all ages of the world, — or 

 that I condemn or think slightingly of ancient husbandry. Let 

 me prevent such unjust deduction. In the many years wdiich I 

 spent in studying the classical writers of Greece and of Rome, 

 I could not do otherwise, even with but a moderate degree of 

 attention, than to acquire some knowledge of the agriculture of 

 the ancients, and it was my first design to address you on that 

 theme, contrasting it with the methods of the moderns. But 

 recording my thoughts as they rose within me, I was led by 

 them in another direction. Yet let me here say in brief, what 

 I might have said more in detail, that agriculture was held in 

 the highest estimation among the earlier and later nations of 

 antiquity. Kings were its "nursing fathers, and queens its 



