30 TRANSACTIOXS. 



converting it from a servile drudgery to one of the elegant 

 arts, and winning for it heights of excellence and honor. 

 I am afraid it must be acknowledged that intellectual 

 apathy has been the drowsy curse that has so long som- 

 nambulized agriculture ; and if it will serve to soften the 

 accusation from an outside party, I will put the pulpit in 

 with the plough ; though who knows but if there were 

 less dull planting, the wholesome contagion would run up 

 the pulpit stairs, and there would be less dull preaching ? 

 Or, if it seems ungracious to press this charge just when 

 the sleepers are waking up, I remind you, on the other 

 hand, that these occasional signs of animation only cast 

 the adjacent obstinacy into a more palpable disgrace. It 

 is not that cheering signals of invigorated intelligence are 

 not stirring the air ; but that these better notions are not 

 made to work their way out, and settle down on the actual 

 fields, and regenerate your daily operations. Hence, I 

 say, what you want is, by the help of the School, some 

 systematic means of pushing every improvement out into 

 the mass that have not yet arisen to come in search of it. 



If you will allow me to ask questions. Are there no 

 tokens to be found among you, that some of the primary 

 maxims of the improved husbandry are as completely 

 disregarded as the bulletins of the Chinese rebellion ? 

 Are there no fields lying in Hampshire, this fall, whose 

 dwarfish crops proclaim as dismally as language could, 

 that it has not yet been found out by their owners that 

 potatoes and turnips crave potash, that clover and peas 

 want lime, that wheat and oats hunger for silex and phos- 

 phoric acid, just as voraciously as the Irishman in the 

 kitchen wants the potatoes, horses the clover, or children 

 late home from school the wheat ? 



Are there not certain triangular stains smirching the 

 sides of barns under the stable-windows, left there by ma- 

 nure-heaps that took all weathers with no roof, which tell 

 every passer-by that these prodigal feeders, though they 

 locked the barn doors every night, and set traps for foxes, 

 and sent constables after the thief that stole their apples, 

 forgot that the atmosphere has a sly way of turning 



