ADnaEss. 17 



Mules were also worked to considerable extent, while the 

 raising of poultry received a large share of attention, and was 

 made a prominent source of pleasure and profit. There are few 

 departments of modern farming, indeed, which were not car- 

 ried to great perfection by the ancients. 



It is truly a matter of surprise, and the more astonishing 

 the more we contemplate it, that with all the improvements 

 of the moderns in every other art, the modes of communica- 

 tion, the application of machinery to shorten labor, the dis- 

 covery of printing and a thousand other wonders in the arts 

 and sciences, the ancients, in all the practical details of farm- 

 ing, seem nearly to have equalled us, and we are led to inquire 

 wherein we have excelled them. The answer is brief and 

 simple. What we have done more than they, is chiefly in 

 the introduction of a great number of plants into cultivation, 

 which has enabled us to perfect the system of rotation, which 

 was necessarily limited and interspersed with fallows by them, 

 and even by the moderns, till within the last two centuries. 

 Many of these plants were consequent to the discovery of this 

 continent. We have, also, to some extent brought the scien- 

 ces to bear on the perfection of agricultural implements, by 

 which we have economized the physical strength both of man 

 and beast. The investigations of science into the peculiari- 

 ties of diff'erent soils, and the better understanding of the 

 nature of plants and the soils adapted to them, have done 

 something and are destined to do more for farming. What 

 the ancients did by guess, the moderns may do with the cer- 

 tainty of demonstration. 



We should derive neither pleasure nor profit from the at- 

 tempt to trace the progress of agriculture through those dreary 

 times when Rome, absorbed in luxury and enervated by vice, 

 was gradually yielding to the northern conqueror ; or later, in 

 the darkness of the Middle Ages, when learning hid itself in 

 the gloomy walls of the cloister ; when every science and all 

 the arts of peace withered and perished among men ; when 

 the poor menial toiled without knowledge or hope, and the 

 very earth, as if to revenge the neglect of her children, some- 



