JOHN C. GRAY'S ADDRESS. 205 



The first of these was the late Colonel Pickering. No writer 

 on these topics, in this or any country, has written with more 

 practical good sense, and philosophical power of generalization. 

 His address at Brighton, to which I have already alluded, is, in 

 fact, a most valuable treatise on the whole subject of Massachu- 

 setts agriculture, and comprises information on the most im- 

 portant topics, which no ordinary mind could have condensed 

 in the same compass. He also wrote largely in other essays, on 

 the much vexed question, on the importation of foreign animals, 

 and on forest trees, and contributed materially to the documents 

 of the Agricultural Society of Essex County, over which he pre- 

 sided for many years. Colonel Pickering was not an impas- 

 sioned, nor perhaps a highly elegant writer. But his style was 

 marked by great neatness and precision, concise almost to a 

 fault, but yet free from obscurity, plain and sometimes homely, 

 but always natural, grave, and suited to his subject. His mind 

 was uncommonly searching and logical, and he seldom took up 

 a topic without nearly exhausting it, and leaving little to be 

 said, at least on his own side of the question. His writings, if 

 collected, would form a most valuable body of agricultural in- 

 formation, and I believe our enlightened farmers, generally, 

 would feel called upon to differ from very few of his conclusions. 

 His interest in agriculture, as well as his intellectual vigor, con- 

 tinued to the end of his long life, and the last time in which he 

 appeared in any way before the public, was in the delivery of 

 an agricultural address to the society of his native county, 

 about three months before his death. 



There is no friend to Massachusetts agriculture, who will de- 

 ny that it has been deeply indebted to the writings and personal 

 influence of the late Mr. Lowell, of Roxbury. This gentleman 

 was long known and respected among us, and distinguished for 

 his warm and liberal feelings, his powerful and acute powers of 

 reasoning, and his copious natural eloquence. He wrote much 

 in his early days, on questions on which the honest and intelli- 

 gent men of his time were greatly divided in opinion, and which 

 are now of little moment, except as mere matters of political his- 

 tory. But, for the last twenty years of his life, his pen was de- 

 voted almost exclusively to agricultural subjects. On these 



