640 ' [Assembly 



to the highest pitch in the days of their glory, that their knowledge 

 of the arts and sciences allowed. The gardens of Lucullus and Ly- 

 sander, and the hanging gardens of Babylon, bear witness to this. 

 With us in our day it has become a science, a study, a pursuit of 

 the best educated, the most distinguished, the most patriotic in all 

 civilized countries. It is no longer a mere custom of scratching 

 ignorantly the surface of the earth, and depositing a few grains; it 

 is no more a rude and unenlightened occupation for boors and peas- 

 ants. It makes all other sciences tributary, and all the discoveries 

 of chemistry, and geology, and mechanics, are pressed into its ser- 

 vice. It is coming, very properly, to be considered as the science 

 first to be perfected. 



In all old and thickly settled countries, where the demand presses 

 hard on the supply, the invention and energies of statesmen are em- 

 ployed to keep before the want of food. The day is probably far 

 distant when we shall ever be so densely populated as to feel this 

 sort of pressure, but it will eventually come, and then not even the 

 exuberant and inexhaustible prairi<es of Illinois, and the fathomless 

 alluvion of the valley of the Mississippi can more than supply our 

 wants. We may learn irom China how this may be. China, larger 

 than we, with all our territory, though we include all that which our 

 government seems to demand of Mexico, and with a soil in all re- 

 spects as rich as ours — her great rivers, Hoang-ho and Kiang-hu, 

 watering valleys as long and fertile as that of the Mississippi, and 

 the great plains of her Northwestern regions, bearing grain like our 

 great Northwest, and her southern provinces raising rice on every 

 inch of tillable soil — China finds it difficult, from all this terri- 

 tory, and by all the untiring and skilful agricultural industry of her 

 people, to feed her millions, 



So important do these sagacious people think it to promote agri- 

 culture, that the greatest national celebration they have is an agri- 

 cultural one, on which the Brother of the Sun and Moon, as they term 

 their monarch, reverently scratches a furrow on the face ot his mother 

 Earth, holding the plow with his own hand, and attended by all his 

 chief difrnitaries. 



There is not an inch, I might say, of arable land in all China not 

 cultivated; is there a patch anywhere, among barren rocks, a little 

 dell among sandy hills, a strip that can be reclaimed from some mo- 

 rass, it is seized on by the economical Chinese., and made to bear food 

 for man. Some writer gives an almost incredible account — incredi- 



