AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS. 233 



winnowed it with the wind of heaven, and finally ground it 

 by the slow process of the hand-turned millstone. 



Nor had the Romans, a century later, with all their boasted 

 triumphs in war, law, science and the arts, progressed 

 much further in the mechanical appliances of the farm. The 

 improvement in farming tools was very slow till well down 

 into the seventeenth century, and has been more rapid and 

 positive during the past hundred years than in all previous 

 time. Virginia, as early as 1610, had a glass house, smelting 

 furnaces, and manufactories of pitch, tar, potash, and some 

 other articles for domestic use and exportation. Within 

 twenty-five years from the settlement of the Colony of Mas- 

 sachusetts Bay, the people had built mills, discovered the 

 existence of iron ore, erected furnaces and commenced the 

 manufacture of various articles, among which were some 

 farming tools, so that the origin of American agricultural 

 implements may almost be said to have been commenced 

 with American manufactures, at the settlement of the coun- 

 try. 



This event carries us back to a period anterior to the dis- 

 covery and application of nearly all those great instrumen- 

 talities in science and mechanism which have revolutionized 

 the industrial aspects of the world, and controlled its social, 

 moral and political condition. 



At that time the latent energy of steam, and the subtle 

 agency of the electric fluid were scarcely suspected ; the cot- 

 ton-gin, power-loom, spinning-jenny, mowing, reaping, and 

 sewing machines were unimagined. The lucifer match, 

 illuminating gas, and the photograph, with an infinity of ap- 

 plications of the principles of nature now most familiar, were 

 then unknown, and the great discoverer of the law of uni- 

 versal gravitation was himself unborn. 



Indeed, brief as the intermediate period has been, compared 

 with the ages of the past, it covers nearly all the improve- 

 ments that now are deemed of the most essential importance. 

 The art of printing, it is true, had been discovered, but 

 stereotype plates, cylinder and power presses, lithogtaphic 

 and other forms of engraving, and most of the improve- 

 ments which have made " the art preservative " the most 



