No. 4.] AGRICULTURAL ORGANIZATIONS. 255 



Could an individual of the eighteenth century come back, 

 he would 1)0 overcome and completely bewildered with tiie 

 man}^ changes that have taken place along every line. 

 Could he take up the daily paper of to-day, he would find it 

 utterly impossible to understand the expressions he would 

 meet in every paragraph. The advertisements of saleslady, 

 the typewriter, the stenographer, the lineman, the gripman, 

 the motorman, the conductor, the electrician, the elevator 

 boy and a host of others, whose trades and occupations are 

 so familiar, would be men and women concerning whose 

 daily life and occupation he would be unable to form the 

 faintest conception. Could the farmer of a hundred years 

 ago come back, with what astonishment would he look upon 

 the modern farm implements and machinery. He would be 

 unable to conceive for what purpose they were made, or 

 how they could be used. The sulky plow, the various kinds 

 of harrows and cultivators, planting machines, reaping, 

 mowing and other harvesting machines, horse rakes, potato 

 diggers, lawn mowers and many others whose purposes he 

 could not understand, would till him with wonder and 

 amazement. 



It is next to impossible to note a tithe of the improve- 

 ment along every line and in every direction. Indeed, 

 human pursuits are so intimately connected and interwoven 

 with each other that an improvement in one tends to the 

 advancement of them all. The changes that have taken 

 place in material things are hardly a measure of the changes 

 that have taken place in the constitutions of the people and 

 society, and esj)ecially in education. We of to-day are 

 filled with wonder, if we but stop to consider the marvellous 

 changes that have taken place within our own recollection 

 along every line, and the wonderful improvement for our 

 comfort and welfare. 



In this wonderful advance, which is but the outcome of 

 advancing civilization, agricultural organizations have been 

 an agency, among many others, exerting an influence which 

 may have been silent, yet none the less potent, organized 

 for a specific purpose, the prosecution of which helped 

 along the general advance and called for and made possible 

 other and kindred organizations. The farmers' clubs and 

 granges are organizations of this character, whose purpose 



