2 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



Agriculture can be pursued, however, as an art, and hold its 

 rank among the most honorable labors of mankind. We honor 

 the artisan who builds nobly and well, — who rears the palace, 

 the capitol, the sacred fane. The names of such men live long 

 after their marvellous works have been touched rudely by the 

 finger of time. It will be equally so with the artist of agricul- 

 ture, who designs and executes from the rude area of a given 

 piece of earth some fertile and smiling homestead, to bear to 

 distant generations his prospective wisdom. Man rises from the 

 lowest to the highest grade of social life as his mind craves, and 

 seeks, and finds its needs. In no pursuit else do we see this so 

 plainly as in agriculture. The most ignorant, careless and 

 improvident condition is that of the savage. Except in form 

 and cunning, the savage man is no higher than the brute he 

 pursues for excitement or for food. The cravings of hunger 

 prompt him to periodical exertion, and the wild fruits and the 

 game are his food. The selection of certain kinds of seeds and 

 fruits opens the way to their increase, and when he selects such 

 to commit them to the ground, waiting for their seeds in turn, he 

 enters the barbarous age. But he must be likewise on the search 

 for other means of subsistence while the seeds are vegetating 

 and the fruits are coming to perfection ; and this induces the 

 nomadic habits, such as the Indian of our country is, and such 

 as the earlier shepherd-tribes were. To this condition of man 

 we owe the undoubted origin of many of our most valuable ani- 

 mals and cultivated plants ; and the Indian corn, the pumpkin, 

 water-melon, beans, squash, all lay us under obligation to those 

 nomadic tribes which were found here when the earliest mis- 

 sionaries visited these shores, previous to the colonies established 

 by our ancestry. * 



The barbarous age in agriculture still lingers, and the mythi- 

 cal or traditional, to which I alluded, is no more than its highest 

 form and extremest development. It prompts the idle and the 

 unthrifty to emigrate from ^their homes to the Far West, in 

 hopes to find in its virgin soils some excuse for negligence and 

 untbrift. But it carries with it its own ruin, and impoverishes 

 in turn, by exhaustion, the most fertile natural portions of the 

 earth's surface, be it the alluvial soils and green mountains of 

 Vermont, or the broad i)rairies of Kansas ! The industry, per- 

 severance and art, which are essential to successful cultivation, 



