598 SELECTIONS FROM ADDRESSES. 



that there were farms on each side of him, which were running 

 out, and farms which were improving, — farms adjacent to each 

 other, and originally precisely similar, the same products of 

 which now vary one-half. The range of production among 

 us is too enormously wide, to be consistent with the supposi- 

 tion that there is any recognized best system. No one doubts 

 that sixty or seventy bushels of wheat, one hundred and forty 

 or one hundred and fifty bushels of corn, or five or six hundred 

 bushels of potatoes, three or four tons of hay, have been often 

 produced to the acre, and that by the fair and open processes 

 of husbandry. Now if these figures are twice or three times 

 as much as the average crops among us, must it not prove 

 that farming is at best pretty poorly understood ? Suppose a 

 cotton mill of equal size and number of hands with another, 

 turned out twice the quantity of yarn or cloth, how long would 

 it be before a general stir and probing of the matter would be 

 made ? Yet compare the value of the Indian corn crop with 

 the cotton manufacture, and the latter interest will be found 

 an insignificant topic of investigation. 



Few persons can conceive the immense aggregate of money 

 which a small per centage of increase in any of our great agri- 

 cultural .staples will heap up. For example, our Indian corn 

 crop in Massachusetts is not short of two millions of bushels. 

 The man who tells us how to produce ten per cent, more than 

 usual, adds $100,000 to the actual money wealth of the State. 



Mr. John Delafield, whom I recollect in my boyhood as the 

 exact and careful cashier of a city bank, where I was in the 

 habit of doing the clerk's business of a mercantile house, and 

 who, obeying the instinct I have adverted to in my opening 

 remarks, retired to cultivate a farm in Seneca County, N. Y., 

 and who is, or lately was, President of the New York State 

 Agricultural Society, in an elaborate and accurate report, 

 drawn up as a man of his habits and pursuits alone is apt to 

 put together statistical tables, demonstrates that in his county, 

 the average wheat crop, fifteen years previous, had got down 

 to ten or twelve bushels to the acre. Year before Itist, it 

 averaged twenty-five bushels. Why should it not reach fifty 

 bushels, if, as there is abundant proof, it has in the same 

 climate reached sixty and seventy bushels ? 

 . I need scarcely say, that most of the great recent improve- 



