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crops. It seems to me that if our farmers paid the atten- 

 tion and devoted the skill to apple-raising, that the de- 

 mand, both at home and abroad, now warrants, apples 

 would be a staple scarcely second to any other. 



New resources are always being developed by a thrifty 

 pjople. When my native state of Maine had pretty much 

 stripped its forests of pine and spruce trees, the question 

 arose what could be found to reward the labor of the lum- 

 bjrmen. It was presently found, because of the discovery 

 of the method of turning wood to pulp and thence to pa- 

 per, that the bass-wood trees, which were previously reck- 

 oned worthless, were the most marketable of all the forest 

 trees. I have found the woodsmen of Maine, on my recent 

 summer visit, to be largely given to the raising and lum- 

 bering of white birch, to be used for spools, tooth-picks 

 and the like, and these rapid-growing trees give them new 

 cuttings, on the same ground, every eleven years. The 

 former entire lumber yield of Maine, I am told, is now 

 more than equalled pecuniarily by the ice yield of the Ken- 

 nebec and Penobscot. Time was, when New Hampshire, 

 with its barren hills, was reckoned hard soil on which to 

 raise anything but men ; now it finds its most lucrative 

 harvest to be from summer boarders. 



I am confident that the yet undeveloped resources of 

 Essex County, — to be found perhaps in the appliance of 

 the sewerage of our cities to fertilization, in the applica- 

 tion of wind-generated electricity to the soil, in extending 

 natural irrigation as insurance against rain failure and 

 summer drought, — will advance agriculture as much be- 

 yond its present standard as it is now advanced beyond 

 what it was when the land was devoted to maize growing 

 by the Indian sagamores. 



There will come a day when farmers will really believe 

 that to concentrate labor and fertilization on five acres will 

 be more profitable than to spread labor and fertilization 

 thin on fifteen acres. Every military student knows that 



