290 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



adopted for accelerating their development by accurate experiments 

 in a manner commensurate with that which had been realized in all 

 the other great branches of industry." 



And here we think it fitting to add that, while horticulture 

 is the handmaid of agriculture, and with it is very influential 

 in its interchanges with other arts and trades, to no man do 

 we owe more for the perfecting and consequent usefulness of 

 this department here in Massachusetts — unless, possibly, it 

 may have been to Gen. Dearborn himself — than to the honored 

 member of this Board, Col. Marshall P. Wilder. 



And here, too, we may add, as elsewhere intimated, that 

 agriculture operates interchangeably with all the arts and 

 industries, and that we think we may truthfully say it is the 

 basis of support to them all, not excepting the fine or lib- 

 eral arts. For while the poets, like Homer and Virgil of the 

 ancients, and Scott, Burns, Young, Tennyson, Longfellow, 

 and numerous other of the moderns, have been composing 

 their immortal verse, the bronzed-faced yeomanry have been 

 at work in the vineyard or in the field, producing food, not 

 only for themselves, but for the multitude of admiring ones 

 whose long hours and days are beguiled and charmed by their 

 works. So of another class. Beethoven, Handel, Hastings, 

 Mason and others practised their enchanting art (for music is 

 an art as well as a science) to the delight of the multitudes, 

 many of whom lived by the sweat of their faces, and rendered 

 back freely of the fruits of their hard toil to these masters of 

 song. While Phidias and Powers are plying the chisel, bring- 

 ing out of the unseemly block of granite or marble the beau- 

 tiful eiy-w (image), the practical farmer is toiling on in part 

 to raise the means with which to pay for the sight-seeing, 

 or, perchance, to purchase the polished form. And while a 

 Raphael, a Michael Angelo, or a West sits at his easel put- 

 ting the delicate touches of his brush upon a most beautiful 

 work of art, the farmer is delving in the field to feed the 

 artist, and it may be to adorn his cottage with some of the 

 productions of his genius. So, in like manner, is recipro- 

 cated the work of the master and his men who place in and 

 upon otherwise plain structures, the ornamental in archi- 

 tecture. 



