232 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



The rude instruments of husbandry sculptured on Assy- 

 rian walls and Egyptian tombs were continuously used by 

 Eastern nations down to a comparatively modern date, and 

 are not entirely given up yet in some portions of those coun- 

 tries ; and even among those nations of Europe boasting 

 themselves to be earliest the most refined and advanced in 

 science and in art, their implements for cultivating the soil 

 were rude, clumsy, unhandy and unartistic to the last 

 degree. 



That the early Greeks, for instance, to whom we are con- 

 stantly referred for examples of marvellous beauty in archi- 

 tecture, sculpture and painting, of wondrous eloquence, 

 poetry and philosophic learning, had among them mechanics 

 of the highest skill, is manifest by the magnificent armor 

 and equipments of war as described by Homer, Hesiod, and 

 later by Virgil, and by the exquisite gems and jeweliy con- 

 stantly found beneath the soil of that classic land, showing 

 us in their refined savageness those ever-present traits of an 

 unchristianized people, a special devotion to the art of war 

 and to their personal adornment. 



It certainly seems strange that a people who lived among 

 such matchless architecture as their shrines and temples, who 

 gazed on the exquisite statuary of Phidias and Praxiteles 

 and the lovely paintings of Apelles, Zeuxis and Parhasius, 

 who applauded the grand tragedies of ^schylus and Sopho- 

 cles or the eloquence of JEschines and Demosthenes, who 

 drank inspiration from those fountains of philosophy and 

 wisdom, Socrates and Plato, should have so entirely neg- 

 lected the art of agriculture and the cultivation of the soil ; 

 and in that occupation of life which furnished them their 

 daily sustenance should have bestowed no thought nor care 

 to improve the means by which it was procured. They, 

 whose soldiers wore elegant armor and carried highly finished 

 weapons, whose nobles and women wore curious and exqui- 

 sitely wrought jewelry, scratched the surface of the soil 

 for the reception of the seed, as their ancestors did, with the 

 crooked limb of a tree, harvested the crop with an indiffer- 

 ent reaping-hook, threshed it under the slow tread of the 

 muzzled ox or the livelier movement of horses on a chariot. 



