THE MANSE GARDEN. 197 



miums be offered; let the microscope be called in; let 

 many experiments be made; and if nothing will do 

 recourse must be had to a plant of some other kind, 

 till the new insect, or rather till the insect that has 

 found in the turnip a new supply of food, and has 

 multiplied according to the extent of its provision, 

 be starved by the change, and compelled to draw in 

 the boundaries of its empire, leaving some other 

 creature to grow great in its turn by feeding on the 

 new and substituted plant. Thus it would appear, 

 that agriculture, without any clog appended by un- 

 propitious laws of the state, or ruin inflicted by Gothic 

 invasions, has in nature certain restrictions which 

 deny to her a course at once surely and indefinitely 

 progressive that whilst the territories reclaimed 

 from sterility are yet held, and the wealth they have 

 produced is yet unimpaired, the knowledge that has 

 been slowly and laboriously gotten must needs be 

 abandoned, and the cultivator must turn back, with 

 childlike effort, to get new skill of things yet un- 

 known and untried. Thus there will never be a 

 time in which it may be said that nothing new has 

 to be learned; thus industry is stimulated, whilst 

 pride is repressed repressed, in the present instance, 

 by the discovery that the labour and science of an 

 age, which have been carried so far in the turnip 

 husbandry as to change the face of the country, and 

 to affect all its economical arrangements, may be 

 marred by an enemy, keeping pace in the progress 

 of its power with the progress of man's improvements, 

 and by the very help of man becoming so great as to 

 drive him from the field, yet all the while so hardly 

 visible as to require the use of the microscope that 

 we may learn the fact or manner of its existence ! 



