164 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



strong additional inducement to the general adoption of this 

 practice, so essential, and at the same time so neglected. 



Personal intercourse, if not the only, is certainly the chief, 

 means by which the inhabitants of the different States of our 

 widely extended Union may be enabled to acquire a proper 

 knowledge of the wants and the character of each other, and, 

 above all, to cherish those feelings of regard so essential to 

 the prosperity, if not the existence, of our nation. The press, 

 however great the obligations we owe it, is of necessity al- 

 ways an imperfect, and sometimes an unfaithful, mirror of pub- 

 lic sentiment; and it is to personal intercourse, and to the 

 spirit of mutual fairness and friendship which such intercourse 

 will assuredly generate, that we must look to supply the 

 deficiencies and correct the aberrations of that mighty engine 

 of good and of evil. 



It were to be wished, indeed, .that the practice of travelling 

 extensively in our own country were often pursued, at least as 

 a preliminary to a European tour. We should not find in 

 that case, as we think we now do in some instances, the most 

 incorrect representations of the character and manners of our 

 population, proceeding from the pens of our own tourists in 

 other countries. To many of our best educated and most ac- 

 complished men the interior of other States, if not of their 

 own, is a terra incognita, and this, too, in spite of those 

 facilities of communication which exist in the United States to 

 a greater degree than in almost any portion of the old world. 



I need not state how thinly this country is peopled in com- 

 parison witli any other in an equal state of advancement, nor 

 repeat how large a portion of those wide spaces which 

 separate our principal settlements from each other is covered 

 with magnificent forests. The traveller who can relish the 

 beauties of these splendid collections of vegetable wonders 

 can have few intervals of idleness or weariness. 



Vet, however valuable we may consider a taste for these 

 prominent beauties of our own scenery merely as a never-fail- 

 ing source of occupation and enjoyment, there arc still other 

 reasons of the highest moment why such a taste should be 

 anxiously cherished ; we mean as one of the principal sources 



