16 [Assembly 



The Farmers' Club has been continued since the last report, with 

 unabating interest. The receipt of rare and choice seeds for distribu- 

 tion has increased, and many thousand grafts are already promised 

 for the coming grafting season. 



From a comparatively small beginning, the operations of the In- 

 stitute have constantly been expanding for twenty years. All its 

 measures and movements have been steadily directed to utility and 

 improvement. How much of our unprecedented success in agricul- 

 ture and the arts, may be attributed to these powerfully exciting 

 means, continued unremittingly for twenty years, we shall not at- 

 tempt to estimate — their measure we leave to the judgment of an 

 impartial community. If what has been done thus far meets the 

 approbation of the Legislature, so as to render the conductors worthy 

 of its confidence, then we most respectfully ask the members to ex- 

 amine our position and plans, and the necessity for their help to 

 carry out these objects, recommended by them in our charter — plans 

 pregnant, as we believe, with vastly beneficial consequences to our 

 State and country. 



We require for the benefit of our farmers, gardeners, and our art- 

 ists, whose interest our charter enjoins us to promote, not only in 

 this State, but over the whole United States, a large hall, for the 

 daily exhibition of machines, models, and specimens of genius and 

 art, in all the varieties of improvement; particularly the new ma- 

 chines, tools and implements of husbandry, for the free examination 

 of our fellow-citizens, both of the city and country — with steam 

 power connected, to exhibit the practical operation of all the new 

 labor-saving machines of agriculture and the arts — with competent 

 professors to lecture upon them and point out their uses, and illustrate 

 their principles, operations, and objects. This should be open to 

 visitors at all times, free of expense, in order to be most extensively 

 useful, especially to the farmer, who from his habits of economy is 

 liable to be deterred from the benefits of information by a small sum, 

 although from his insulated position and mode of living he may most 

 need the benefits of the knowledge to be obtained from such an 

 establishment. 



We have a small room provided by the bounty of our city corpo- 

 ration, but it does not include one-fifth of the space requisite. The 

 articles cannot conveniently be seen or handled. As a place of re- 

 creation, apart from utility, almost every man visiting New-York 

 from the country, would be gratified to spend an hour, when the 



